


Animorphs: The Rickoning

by PermutationGroupS7



Series: Rickverse [2]
Category: Animorphs, Rick and Morty, r!Animorphs
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-29
Updated: 2018-12-29
Packaged: 2019-09-28 19:20:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 23,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17188865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PermutationGroupS7/pseuds/PermutationGroupS7
Summary: Morty wants his own adventure, bro. Off to the Reckoningverse, bro; watch out for vissy tree tho. Featuring "Get Schwifty," as well as the original songs "Arm-Heart-Tube" and "You and Me, Visser Three".





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Before undertaking this journey, please read and understand the following disclaimers:
> 
>   * Yes, this is a Rick and Morty / r!Animorphs crack fic crossover with multiple chapters and more than 20,000 words. No, I do *not* know when to quit.
>   * This is a sequel to my first work on AOOO, [Harry Potter and the Methods of Ricktionality](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14770070/chapters/34158194). Reading that first is not strictly necessary, but it may help for understanding all the physics.
>   * I sincerely apologize to everyone who clicked on the link thinking it was another [Animorphs: The Reckoning](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5627803/chapters/12963046) (r!Animorphs) chapter by WhatWouldEnderDo. May chapter 2 of this fic serve as reparations. If you haven't read r!Animorphs, GO READ IT NOW.
>   * Chapter 1 continues in the style of Ricktionality and sets up chapter 2. Chapter 2, on the other hand, is the real meat and bones of this work. Truly a chapter for the r!Animorphs fans, it is the strangest work of experimental fiction I have ever written. Hopefully it is as fun to read as it was to write.
>   * None of this will make any sense whatsoever unless you are caught up on r!Animorphs
>   * It may also help to be familiar with Rick and Morty lore, and Animorphs original series lore.
>   * As before, the last chapter contains extras.
>   * Much appreciation to ALL THREE OF YOU in my target audience who actually make it through to the end.
> 


Rick and Morty are sitting in the cell of a dungeon on a foreign planet in a distant dimension. Their captor, a tall, dark-green upright slug-alien with salamander limbs, stands on the other side of the bars, draped in a kingly robe and wearing a lush velvet-gold crown with holes for his eyestalks. He is laughing a dark, evil laugh. 

**King Alien:** Hahahaha! Yes, soon, Rick, soon, we will unlock the secrets of your portal gun, and have free reign of the multiverse! Your fellow Resistance collaborators held out for an admirably long time, but at last, they have given us the information we needed... but, just to be sure... [gestures to the guards] _take the boy..._  
**Morty:** Noooooo! Rick, help, oh god, Rick, do something, oh my god... 

Rick rolls his eyes. 

**Rick:** Alright, that's it, this has really gotten boring. Time to go, Morty. 

Rick snaps his fingers and a portal appears under the king, who falls into it screaming. Another snap and the guards' heads explode. Reaching his hand out to the side, the portal gun materializes in Rick's hand. A third snap and a portal appears in front of him. Rick steps through with a shell-shocked Morty into Rick's lab in the garage. 

**Morty:** _Rick?_ What. THE FUCK. Was that. Are you telling me. That you could have gotten. Us out of there. AT. ANY. TIME?  
**Rick:** Yep  
**Morty:** [Moans and beats Rick with his fists] WE SPENT TWO WEEKS IN AN ALTHORIAN DUNGEON AND WE COULD HAVE LEFT WHENEVER!!!?!?! AND YOU LET ME THINK THAT IT WAS HOPELESS SINCE THEY HAD YOUR PORTAL GUN!!!?! OH MY GOD, THEY MADE US WATCH AS THEY EXECUTED OUR FRIENDS-  
**Rick:** Morty, I've literally never needed my portal gun. Integrating portal ability directly into my physiology was the _first_ thing I did with the tech. I keep the gun around for redundancy and misdirection.  
**Morty:** waAAAAA teeUUeeuuu FUUUUUuuu  
**Rick:** Seriously? HPMOR had that little of an effect on you? This aspect of my personality should be quite predictable to you at this point.  
**Morty:** Why would you do this? Fucking whyyyyyyyyy!?!?!  
**Rick:** Why spend two weeks in an Althorian dungeon if that's the case? Because sometimes, Morty, you really gotta _commit_ to the narrative, you know? I thought you wanted fun. I thought you wanted _adventure_. Welp, time to wake up Morty, but if you want adventure you gotta commit to the bad as well as the good. That's what make it an adventure - the not-knowing whether things will turn out OK.  
**Morty:** Fuck. You. Next time, we're doing an adventure that _I_ want to do. And you're going to do nothing but sit in the background and help me out.  
**Rick:** Your adventures are always soooo laaaaame  
**Morty:** Oh really, Rick? Because I just so happen to have gotten the idea from that HPMOR trip you dragged me on. Ever heard of Animorphs: The Reckoning?  
**Rick:** No?  
**Morty:** Well, Rick, it's another rational fanfiction that I discovered after finishing HPMOR. And it's really good, and also I loved Animorphs when I was in middle school. So that's our next adventure. You owe me. So you've got some preparatory reading to do. I'm gonna go do homework. Let me know when you've finished.  
**Rick:** Ugh. Fine. Whatever floats your boat. If it'll calm you down, you can have your adventure this ONE time. 

A few days later, Rick approaches Morty. 

**Rick:** Alright, Morty. I went into a pocket dimension and read the original series as well as Animorphs: The Reckoning. Gotta say, it was actually fantastic. So: this is your adventure. How do you want to proceed?  
**Morty:** No God mode this time. No Cronenberging things up! All I want to do is join the Animorphs, make friends with them, have a fun time fighting Visser Three, eventually defeat him in a satisfying way, and then leave. All I want _you_ to do is get rid of the Ellimist and Crayak for me, and take their place to make the narrative fun for me. Got it?  
**Rick:** [Sighs] Can-do, Morty. But first, I need to take some... precautionary measures. The Council of Ricks got all pissed at me after last time when I accidentally unleashed HJPEV and Eliezer Yudkowsky on the multiverse. That is _not_ happening again. Follow me. 

Rick and Morty enter Rick's lab in the garage. Inside is a strange new machine that Morty has never seen before. It's a large metal box covered with blinking little lights. Morty walks up to a small window on the box and peers inside, where he sees miniscule wisps of what look like galaxies... 

**Rick:** [Fiddling with knobs on the machine] Come on, Morty. We're not portaling in this time. We're taking the machine. Ready?  
**Morty:** Yup!  
**Rick:** [Presses a button] 

* * *

Rick and Morty materialize on an empty street in a peaceful suburb near Washington D.C.. A young, gangly boy is walking down the street in front of them, facing the other direction and not noticing their presence. 

**Morty:** Rick? Can you please pre-target the portal gun to the blender dimension?  
**Rick:** [Looking surprised] Uhhh, okay. Done. [Hands Morty the portal gun]  
**Morty:** Thanks. 

Morty trots up to the boy on the street and taps him on the shoulder. The boy jumps, whipping around to face Morty. 

**Morty:** Excuse me. Are you David? David Poznanski?  
**David:** ...yes? Why? 

Morty shoots a portal behind David. 

**Morty:** Because FUCK YOU [front-kicks David through the portal] 

A red mist phases through the portal interface and coats Morty's face with small, shiny droplets of blood. The portal closes as Morty stands staring forward, panting with rage. 

**Rick:** Geez, Morty, that was _dark._  
**Morty:** He deserved it. 

Morty begins to walk forward, but Rick holds up a hand and stops him. 

**Rick:** Hold on, Morty. I expect that we've made a sufficient disturbance for the Ellimist to show up right about... now. 

Suddenly, space _warps._ The sidewalk, street, and houses all recede into blackness, as Rick and Morty are pulled into a Z-space pocket dimension. Two humanoid avatars appears before them. One, an elderly elfish entity with pointed ears, simple black robes, and an all-encompassing white beard. The other, a black metal pillar with an eye grafted on top, swiveling on a tentacle-like optic nerve. 

**Rick:** Heyyyyy, Ellimist! Crayak! Hooowwwww's it going? [Takes a swig of alcohol] Nice pocket dimension!  
**Ellimist:** You are interfering with our game. Who are you? Our scans cannot penetrate the Z-space shield surrounding you.  
**Rick:** Can't have you scanning and simulating us, now can I? I'm Rick, and this is my grandson Morty. This is our galaxy now. Please kindly take your game elsewhere.  
**Crayak:** [In a deep, menacing, voice] Why should we? Your shields are impressive, for their size, but they look entirely destructible with some effort. I sense no other z-space machinery in the vicinity that you could martial to your defense.  
**Rick:** Aaaand that's where you're wrong. You see, before I got to this universe, I made some _edits_ to that "Arbiter" of yours overseeing your game. In particular, it now responds only to my commands. [Waves hand] Whoops! Sorry Crayak, looks like I just lopped off the nodes you positioned around Neptune. [Waves again.] Whoops! Sorry Ellimist, just scrambled the Z-space communication filaments running throughout your Oort cloud computing swarm!  
**Ellimist:** Stop! You've made your point. Very well, we will leave the galaxy.  
**Rick:** Thanks guys! Oh, and please leave behind your Z-space infrastructure when you go. I'm gonna need it for myself.  


Crayak glares at Rick with murder in his eye. But, of course, he always looks like that. After a few seconds, the avatars vanish, and the street warps back into existence as Rick and Morty exit the pocket dimension. 

**Rick:** Alright, Morty, they're gone. This is your show. Now what?  
**Morty:** Now, you stay hidden, help me join the Animorphs, and oversee our missions to make sure we win! Tobias should be in morph down the street a couple of blocks. I'm gonna go find him and ask him to take me to the Animorphs! But watch out, there's a yeerk bug fighter on the loose! Wheee, haha, let's go! 

Rick, looking very annoyed, grudgingly nods and phases into Z-space to watch the events. Morty strolls down the street in the direction David was headed. After a few blocks, he notices a mailbox with the name "Poznanski" engraved on the side. He walks up to the front door. And then, floats. The ground recedes as Morty is pulled upward by the tractor beam from the cloaked bug fighter above the house. The bug fighter meant for David and his father Jeremiah.  
        Inside the bug fighter, a Hork-Bajir stuns Morty (who is actually immune to weapons, but just pretending otherwise), lays him down, and places a yeerk on the side of his face. The yeerk crawls into his ear. Unfortunately for the yeerk, Morty has come with anti-yeerk earplugs pre-installed. Soon after crawling into his head, the yeerk is zapped out of existence. Morty bides his time, waiting for Tobias.  
        Soon, Tobias shows up and wreaks havoc on the bug fighter, taking out the Hork Bajir fighters and crashing the bug fighter into the house. As Tobias is morphing back into his own body, regrowing the arm he severed in the crash, Morty stands up. 

**Morty:** Hey, wow, thanks Tobias! You saved me!  
**Tobias:** [Shoots Morty with a stun gun.] How do you know my name, yeerk?  
**Morty:** [Forgets to pretend to be stunned and continues standing] Oh, I uh... it, it, uh, you just seemed like a Tobias? And I don't have a yeerk in my head, I wanna join you and the Anim-, uh...  
**Tobias:** [Dials up the gun and continues shooting, futilely, while backing away]  
**Morty:** Riiiick! I messed up! Can I get a do-over?  
**Rick:** [Materializing and facepalming] Goddamn it, Morty, what did you think was gonna happen? [Waves hand and paralyzes Tobias, who is attempting to run away] A _do-over_? Seriously? This ain't fuckin' Westworld. And I am _not_ bringing us to another universe, after the effort I put into this one. You know what? I'm just gonna make some edits to this guy's memories to accelerate things a bit. [Disappears] 

Tobias's eyes go wide as he hears this. Horrified, he struggles against the paralysis, but it is no use. Soon, his eyes glaze over, and then brighten again. 

**Tobias:** Morty, was it? You really saved my ass back there. Come with me - I've got some friends I'd like you to meet... 

## Marco

We stood around the campfire - Jake, Tobias, Garrett, and I... facing our new guest and potential Animorph, "Morty." Tobias vouched for him, but nevertheless I sensed that something extremely odd was taking place. There was ... incongruity. A mysterious improbability alarm blaring in my head. _Something's wrong here._ Well, whatever it was, I was about to find out...

"Marco," Jake said, his eyes still locked on Morty's.

I stood up.

"There's this thing about morphing tech," Jake continued. "We know how to use it to look inside somebody's head. To see their thoughts and memories and personality. To find out whether they're telling the truth or not."

I could feel myself shrinking just the tiniest bit, the sensation like falling in slow motion as my clothes grew baggy and loose, as my skin lightened from copper to khaki.

"So Marco's going to take a quick look inside your head, see what you're like from the inside, find out if you're telling the truth or not."

"And if I am?"

"If you are, then maybe this conversation keeps going, and we give you a chance to join our cause and fight the yeerks. But if not..."

Jake trailed off, his eyes intent on Morty's face.

Morty didn't flinch. Just nodded, crossed his arms, and watched, as my hair grew curly and brown and my arms and legs thinned until noodle-like. Another minute passed, and we were eye to eye, identical in height as we were in everything else.

‹Here goes,› I whispered to Jake, and I reached inside for the tiny mental lever- 

_Click._

It was like I had dropped into the sea under a hurricane, tossed left and right by the ocean swells of emotion.

Fear.

Timidity.

Angst.

Lack of self-confidence.

And then I opened his memories.

It was everything I could do to not start screaming.

Blood. Gore. Chaos. _Rick_.

Reality was a vast, inconceivable infinity - and the God of this reality was named _Rick Sanchez_ , and he was a fickle, volatile, cruel, careless God indeed...

And I saw the numerous "adventures" of Rick and Morty, the trippy dimensions, the tentacly aliens, the wake of destruction and death. It was beyond imagination, beyond any conceivable frame of reference I had ever traversed in all my forethought...

This was all a setup. All a fiction. This was Rick and Morty's game, not ours.

And Rick was _here_. Watching.

‹Jake,› I began, trying to keep the horror out of my - 

_-fleeting disorientation-_

‹What's the word, Marco?› 

I began to demorph, feeling relaxed, confident - almost _hopeful_ ‹We definitely want this kid.› I said. ‹Forget being another Tobias - I think he might be another _you_.› 

‹Oh?› 

‹Yeah,› I said, closing down the mental copy of the kid so he wouldn't suffer. ‹Very solid. Perceptive, helpful, loyal, looks out for the little guy. Leader type.› 

Jake turned back toward Morty, gave him a slow, respectful nod. "Marco says good things," he said. "Let's keep talking." 

The boy nodded back, his expression unchanged. 

* * *

The next few weeks are a montage of classic Animorphs adventures: gritty, brutal, and fun. Morty and the Animorphs slowly manage pick apart many of Visser Three's ongoing schemes on earth. Tyagi and her people successfully coordinate with other nations to lead a covert takedown of some yeerk sleeper cells. The attempted call to the Andalites is blocked by some mysterious spacetime anomaly, but the way things are going, who needs the Andalites anyway? 

An extremely down-on-his-luck Visser Three grows increasingly frustrated and trigger-happy. Which, of course, just leads to more mistakes and more frustration. He had always been so careful, so meticulous... what the _vanaryx_ was he doing wrong? Had the hypothetical God-entities at play turned against him? 

Now, all the Animorphs gather around their campsite once again, this time to take a little break and celebrate their victory over the sleeper cell in North Korea. Well, really it was Tyagi's victory, but the Animorphs were the ones who had gathered the intel in a nail-biting morph-spy-thriller. 

**Jake:** Well, guys, I never thought I'd be saying this, not so soon, but it looks like... somehow... _we're winning_. The peace negotiations with Telor are coming along nicely. Most of Visser Three's operations seem to be dismantled by this point. I think we can afford to take tonight off. We could all use the rest anyway.  
**Marco:** Knock on wood.  
**Morty:** Yeah, let's celebrate! This was fun, you guys.  
**Jake:** Excuse me, _fun_? You're calling war fun?  
**Morty:** No, I just, I mean... it was good getting to know all you guys! I, uh...  
**Marco:** Yes, I'm sure the Ellimist set this all up just to be a fun _social exercise_ , wouldn't that be something...  
**Rachel:** Hey, lay off... I'm actually with Morty on this one. Minus the whole war thing, and all the stakes ... the past few weeks have, in fact, been fun. No one has gotten seriously hurt on a mission. Hell, some of our missions were straight out of action movies, I swear...  
**Marco:** Maybe the Ellimist been catching up on Hollywood. Not sure that's a good sign, guys.  
**Morty:** [Smiling to himself] Why do you always have to be so pessimistic, Marco? I think everything's going to be just fine - 

Suddenly, everything stops. The campfire freezes in place, flames suspended mid-flicker. The insects hang in the air, caught mid-flap in invisible amber. The military personel at the camp stand motionless. The Animorphs - Jake, Marco, Tobias, Garrett, Ax, Rachel, and Morty - gaze at each other uncertainly. 

**Marco:** _Fuck._

A form materializes in the midst of the camp. The form of... Rick Sanchez. Stumbling drunk, slurring his words. 

**Rick:** _Heeeyyyyyyy, it's meeeee, the Ellimist_ [stumbles and takes a swig from a flask] 

**Morty:** [Puts his hands in his face.] Oh my god, _Rick_ , you just _had_ to fucking ruin it, didn't you? What the fuck are you doing?  
**Marco:** Wait, hold on... you _know_ this guy?  
**Morty:** [sighs] It's complicated, I'll explain later... Rick? I swear to god...  
**Rick:** You know, MmmORTY, I have, I have, I _*buuurp*_ have feelings too you know, I have _neeeeeeds_ , I want my own adventure too, ya, you know, Morty? It's _booooring_ all up here in Z-space, being _*braahhpp*_ a god and shit... I've been watching movies, Morty, catching up on Hollywood - and then I re-read the Animorphs original series in the Child Simulator Dimension, to see what it was like to read as a little kid... and, and Morty, it was _fun_ , it had, it had lots of fun stuff, and so I thought, I thought we could re-enact some of... some of the fun stuff from the original series...  
**Morty:** Rick, we had a good thing going here, don't you dare...  
**Rick:** Too late! It's time for your first _Megamorphs_ mission! It's _Megamorphs-time_ , Morty, Megamorphs, yeah! 

And before anyone can do anything, Rick snaps his fingers, and the Animorphs are teleported to hot, primordial jungle. 

**Rick:** This, haha, this is dinosaur times, Morty! Remember that? Megamorphs #2, _In the time of the Dinosaurs_ , awwwwww yeeeEEEEAAAaahhh babayyyy!! Your first mission is, uhhh, to, uhhh, collect... one hundred... T-Rex teeth, and, uhhh, fifty... two hundred fifty velociraptor teeth. Before the Chicxulub asteroid hits in twenty-four hours and kills everyone! Good luuuuuck! [vanishes] 

The Animorphs - bewildered, horrified - look back and forth from Morty to the place where Rick vanished. 

**Tobias:** Morty? I think you've got some _serious_ explaining to do. 

**Morty:** [Puts his head in his hands, collapses to the ground, and moans in rage] You know what? I can't. I can't explain. It won't do the reality justice. You should all just morph into me and crawl through my memories. That'll be faster.  
**Marco:** I did that once already, and I sure as hell didn't see _this_...  
**Morty:** Your memories were altered, just do it again. But first. [Gets to his feet, presses his hands to his temples, and recalls the Animorphs original series]. We're in dinosaur times right now. There are probably a dozen predators in the area who want to eat us, so I suggest we all get to a safer place first. 

The Animorphs morph into birds and fly above the treeline, making sure to watch out for any predatory Pterodactyls in the vicinity. They find a ledge on a high rock formation and alight. A few minutes later, they've all morphed into Morty. A few minutes after that, most have demorphed in abject horror. Garrett starts vomiting. Rachel morphs into a bear and destroys a nearby shrub. Jake and Marco remain in Morty-morph, absorbing every detail. Finally, they demorph. Tobias is the first to speak. 

**Tobias:** All in favor of killing Morty? [He and Ax raise their hands]  
**Jake:** Tobias...  
**Tobias** ...or at least kicking him out of the Animorphs and abandoning him, how about that?  
**Jake:** The _problem_ , Tobias, is that he's our only link to this "Rick," and he's also the one who knows the most about the so-called "Animorphs Original Series..."  
**Tobias:** We can just rip it out of his head from morph -  
**Rachel:** Jake's right, Tobias, he's our strongest link to Rick. At least Morty wants us _alive_. Otherwise Rick couldn't care less about us.  
**Morty:** [Resignedly] Look, I'm sorry guys, I know you all hate me now, but I'm your best bet for getting out of this.  
**Marco:** As far as getting out of this is concerned, there is also the small problem that _T-Rex and Velociraptor didn't fucking live in the same time period as one another_.  
**Rachel:** And _two hundred fifty_ teeth? How the friggin' hell are we supposed to find and kill that many animals...  
**Morty:** [Sighs heavily] It doesn't matter, we'll just find some dinosaurs that look close enough to the real thing and then acquire them. Then we'll morph into the dinos, knock the teeth out of the morph, and repeat until we have enough teeth. Trust me, I know Rick - he won't notice.  
**Jake:** Well, that sounds like a plan at least. Let's do it. We can talk more once we have the teeth. 

The Animorphs fly around for a while until they find something that is obviously a T-Rex lurking in the forest below. 

**Jake:** ‹Okay guys, any ideas?›  
**Marco:** ‹Well, I guess someone just has to fly down, land on it, demorph, and acquire it. I volunteer Morty, since accidentally dying isn't a problem for him.›  


Soon, Morty flies down and lands next to the T-Rex's tail. The T-Rex doesn't seem to notice. 

**Morty:** [Demorphing] ‹oh my god don't eat me oh jesus oh geez oh geez› 

Once Morty is out of morph, the T-Rex cocks it head to the side, noticing him. But before it can do anything, Morty places his hand on its tail, and the T-Rex nods as it enters the acquiring trance. When finished, Morty runs away into a nearby thicket and re-morphs a bird. Soon, after flying to a safe location, all the Animorphs have acquired and morphed T-Rexes. 

**Rachel:** [In T-Rex morph] I must say, in spite of everything - this is _fun_. No Visser, no alien body-snatchers, no intelligent adversaries. Just _dinosaurs._ I fucking _love_ dinosaurs. Almost makes me wish I lived in the Animorphs: Original Series universe. 

Tobias, flying as a red-tailed hawk, soon spots some predators that sort of resemble what everyone expects velociraptors to look like. After some careful coordination, three T-Rexes surround the poor predators and converge on their location. Shortly thereafter, the Animorphs acquire their "velociraptor" morphs, and by having Morty repeatedly morph, get his teeth knocked out, and then demorph, they soon have all the teeth they need. 

**Morty:** [Shouting to the air] Rick? We did it. We got the teeth.  
**Rick:** [Appearing, still marvelously drunk] Congrats, you did it!  
**Morty:** Alright, so you'll let us all go home now?  
**Rick:** Haha, no! We're just getting started! 

Rick snaps his fingers and teleports everyone to a city on a distant planet, bustling with activity and strange beings. 

**Rick:** Remember this, Morty? It's the Iskoort homeworld! The Iskoort homeworld, Morty, from book 26, The Attack. The one where Jake morphs into a tiger on the cover. I've placed... seven... Howlers, on the planet. You have... twenty-four hours to kill them all, or, uh, I blow up the planet with antimatter bombs or something... _I'm so fucking drunk_... good luck! [vanishes]  
**Morty:** Goddamn it. [sighs] Okay, guys, follow me. I have a plan. Just so y'all are up to speed, Howlers are deadly warriors with heavy armor and weapons. They're strong and fast, and have a scream that paralyzes you. Not _terribly_ smart, though. But we're not going anywhere near them. We're going to pick them off one by one from a distance. You guys should also acquire earplugs at the nearest available opportunity, just in case, or morph into something with no ears. 

Morty leads the Animorphs through the strange city, past thrumming bazaars where diverse multitudes of beings haggle with vulture-like, accordion-bodied Iskoort traders. 

**Marco:** Wait a minute, they're... they're speaking _English_? What...  
**Morty:** [Sighs] Rick must have picked a version of this world where English just randomly happens to have independently developed here as a common language, just... just don't think about it too much. It's convenient, at least. Wait! [Holds up hand for everyone to stop, and turns to a nearby Iskoort salesman standing next to a chair with what looks like a brain scanner on the top.]  
**Iskoort Salesman:** Memories! Memories for sale! Get your memories over here! Have an interesting memory of your own? Sell it here! Memories!  
**Morty:** Just what I was looking for. 

Morty leads the Animorphs up to the memory salesman. 

**Morty:** Yes, hello, I'd like to sell my memories.  
**Iskoort Salesman:** Perfect! Sit on down and let's see what you've got.  


Five minutes later, the salesman's beak is hanging open and his eyes are bulging out of his head as he sifts through Morty's mind. 

**Iskoort Salesman:** Why... why... these... I've never seen memories like these, why... these will make you rich! With these memories you could buy anything you want! If I sold all my possessions, that wouldn't _begin_ to dent the amount that these are worth...  
**Morty:** Tell you what. I'll hire you as a guide. You help me use these to buy what I want, and when I leave this planet, you can have all the remaining wealth. I don't need it.  
**Iskoort salesman:** ...you would just _give_ me your earnings? That's generous, but perhaps too good to be true? Why should I trust you?  
**Morty:** Look, you _saw_ the memories. Does it look like I care about money?  
**Iskoort salesman:** I suppose not.  
**Morty:** Great! Your first task is to take me to the nearest spaceship dealer. I need a ship with heavy weapons.  
**Iskoort salesman:** But weapons are illegal on a private spaceship!  
**Morty:** Oh, so I guess I'll just go to the next memory salesman then...  
**Iskoort salesman:** No, wait! I know a guy.  
**Morty:** And while we're at it, take me somewhere I can find a good bottle of strong alcohol... I've got an idea... 

Soon, Morty and the Animorphs have purchased a small heavily-weaponed spaceship on the black market, as well as a bottle of the planet's finest alcohol, which Morty stores away in Z-space when he morphs into himself. Manning the controls, Morty flies the ship into the air, cloaking enabled. 

**Jake:** Morty, uh, where did you learned to fly a spaceship?  
**Morty:** Rick takes me on a lot of trips in his personal ship. I had to learn how to drive it for when Rick got too drunk to do it himself. This is a ship with similar controls. 

Morty absent-mindedly flies the ship around the city looking for Howlers. 

**Morty:** [Glancing at the screen] Whoop - there's a howler. Ax? 

Ax, manning the weapons station, encases the howler in force-fields and lifts it up in a tractor beam. Morty flies higher in the air, where Ax incinerates the howler with a laser and launches its corpse into space. 

**Morty:** Great! Six more to go.  
**Rachel:** That felt like cheating.  
**Marco:** It felt like _winning_ to me. I like this plan. 

Five more howlers are dispatched likewise. Marco's brow furrows more and more each time, until he finally says what's been bothering him - 

**Marco:** Uh, Morty?  
**Morty:** [Absent-mindedly] Yes?  
**Marco:** How are you finding these howlers?  
**Morty:** What do you mean?  
**Marco:** I mean, there's a whole _planet_ to search, and the ship's sensors aren't capable of searching with this precision, and there's no way it's _luck_ \- so how are we finding the howlers in the middle of crowds of millions spread around a whole fucking planet?  
**Morty:** I... huh. I don't know. I've just sort of been flying where I feel like, and the howlers turn up. I figured Rick was putting them in our path or something.  
**Marco:** Rick seems a bit too out of it to think of details like this. Something weird is going on.  
**Morty:** Huh. Oh look. [Points at the screen]. The last howler. Hey, Ax, instead of launching this one into space, let's bring it aboard the ship. Everyone should acquire a howler morph. 

Soon, the last howler is captured, zapped unconscious, acquired, and dispatched, and the Animorphs are trying out their new and powerful howler morphs. 

**Morty:** [Shouting to the air] Rick! We did it! We killed all the howlers! Can you please just bring us ho-  
**Rick:** [As a disembodied voice echoing around them] Congrats, you did it! Now for the, the _*buuurrrrp*_ third task!  
**Morty:** Goddammit, Rick - 

The Animorphs are suddenly teleported to a vast olympic-sized arena enclosed on all sizes with thick metal walls. A large viewing window overlooks the arena, behind which stands Rick holding a mic connected to the speaker system. 

**Rick:** [Voice booming through the arena] Alllllllright! Final task! Time for a good old-fashioned morph-fight! No technology, no tricks, no interventions - just a good old-fashioned morph-against-morph showdown! Yeah! Today's showdown is... all of the Animorphs, versus... Visser Three! [Rick snaps his fingers and Visser Three appears in the arena] 

## Esplin

The world blurred and focused around me. I immediately tensed, leaping into a practiced fighting stance and reaching for my sidearm. My hand jabbed at the empty skin where it should have been. I blinked, disoriented. I was no longer aboard my spaceship. _What-_

In a fraction of a second I whipped through my mental checklist. Sidearm gone. Utility belt, gone. Utility pouch hidden under a patch of fake skin, gone. Not in morph, though I had just been previously. I reached out my mind and felt for my ship, for my remote-controlled sentinels, for my backup system - all missing from my telepathic extension. _How-_

I crushed the question and immediately triggered my habit of rapid tactical assessment. I was in a large enclosed arena. Six human children and an Andalite stared at me from across the room, and I immediately recognized some of them as the so-called "Animorphs." A large pane of glass loomed over the arena above me and to the left, in which stood a strange human whom I did not recognize. No obvious exits. Gravity existed here - real or artificial? Options: attack immediately, attempt to communicate, attempt to escape. Attack and escape did not seem feasible if the enemy could do _this_ , but I _was_ still alive, so the enemy did not want me dead, at least immediately. _Communicate, find out more about what is happening_. Was this the work of the higher powers whose existence I had theorized? 

The animorphs backed away. One of the children spoke to the man behind the glass. "You want us to fight _him_?" 

"YeeeeEEEAAaaahh!" The man behind the glass replied. "Morph fight! To the death! Everyone versus Visser Three! Oh, and to make things more interesting, morphing now takes five seconds instead of two minutes! Fight! Fight! Fight! _*burrrp*_ _Fight!_ _Fight!_ _Fight!_ " 

_Communicate make a deal with the Animorphs turn them against the man behind the glass offer them something_

‹Animorphs,›, I broadcast to the seven in the arena, ‹Listen to me, this man is our mutual enemy- › 

The human girl morphed into a giant monster. 

* * *

**Rachel:** [In T-Rex morph.] ‹Oh look, this morph still works. I don't know about you guys, but seven against one? These are the best odds we've ever had. Let's kill the bastard.›  
**Marco:** [Morphs into a howler and turns to Jake] ‹I agree with Rachel. We've never been in a position this good. Your orders, fearless leader?›  
**Esplin:** ‹Animorphs, please! Do not give him what he wants. We must cast aside our differences for our immediate survival! We must work together against the power that has brought us here! As a reward for your cooperation here today I offer you peace and safety - ›  
**Garrett:** ‹AIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE› [Attacks the Visser with weaponized thought-speak, silencing him]  
**Jake:** [Morphs into a T-Rex] ‹Let's kick his ass.› 

Visser Three morphs in a giant, armored, tentacled monster filling half the arena. 

**Marco:** ‹Oh.›  
**Rachel:** ‹It's seven against one. We can still win this.›  
**Ax:** [Morphs into a giant clawed monster half the size of the Visser's] ‹I'm not sure we can kill him in this form, but I think we can wear him down until he is forced to demorph.›  
**Morty:** Hey guys, I'll be your backup, but right now I'm gonna go deal with Rick.  
**Jake:** ‹Fine - see if you can convince him to end this right now. I think the six of us can hold him off. Tobias, Garrett - I have a special mission for the two of you. Everyone else - attack!› 

Rachel, Marco, Jake, and Ax attack the Visser as a T-Rex, Howler, T-Rex, and Giant Whatchamucallit respectively. Tentacles rain down from all sides as the Animorphs begin biting, slashing, and ripping them apart. Meanwhile, Tobias and Garrett slink back into a corner on Jake's secret mission. Morty tries to get Rick's attention through the window. 

**Morty:** [Waving] Riiiiick! Hey Riiiick!  
**Rick:** [Very drunk] Yyyy-ye-yah gotta commit to the narrative, Morty! Gotta, gotta _*braahp*_ finish the mission -  
**Morty:** [Waving the alcohol he got on the Iskoort homework] Look what I brought!  
**Rick:** Awwww yeaaahh, Morty! Bringin' the party! [Snaps his fingers, teleporting Morty into the room with him.]  
**Morty:** Yeah, Rick! This is for you! The drunker you are, the more fun this will be. Drink up! [Thrusts the bottle into Rick's hand]  
**Rick:** [Takes a long swig] Hellll yeah, alcohol!  


The two look out at the chaotic fighting in the arena. Jake, Ax, Rachel, and Marco fight in a rotating pattern, three taking on the Visser while one rests in a corner, demorphing and remorphing to heal wounds. Tobias is a red-tailed hawk perched on one of the the ceiling trusses, holding Garrett, who is a blob of _something_. 

**Jake:** ‹Ax! Cover Rachel as she demorphs! Marco, get in T-Rex morph! Tobias, Garrett, remember, the _instant_ he demorphs...› 

A tentacle thuds against the window as the Visser tries, futilely, to break the glass between the arena and Rick. Morty turns to Rick. 

**Morty:** C'mon, Rick! What are you, a lightweight? Have another swig!  
**Rick:** [Having trouble sitting up, speech incredibly slurred] Thhattss what I'm ta-talkin' about, MmortY! Wwwhen'dyou learn how ta party? [Takes a shot] 

The fighting continues. Tobias and Garrett lie in wait on the ceiling. The others continue tearing away at the tentacles assaulting them. 

**Jake:** ‹We're not making much progress! He's got too many tentacles, and they don't bleed out when slashed. We need to hurt him more seriously.›  
**Marco:** ‹We need a new tactic, let me just - RACHEL DEMORPH DEMORPH NOW› [A T-Rex gushing blood through the hole where its viscera used to be, from the tear the Visser has just slashed in its aorta, flops back behind Marco and quickly demorphs] ‹Wait, this is perfect - Rachel, this may sound a little crazy, but when you re-morph here's what you need to do- › 

**Morty:** Hey Rick, let's play a drinking game. Every time someone gets wounded, you take a drink!  
**Rick:** I, I, uh, ddddoon't, don't know, Mmmortyyy, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm kind offf tiirrred -  
**Morty:** Weak  
**Rick:** Nnnnoo one ccallssss meee weeeak! [Takes a drink] 

Rachel morphs into a fly and zips toward the Visser, dodging the tentacles with ease. She flies directly into one of his wounds. About ten seconds later, the Visser swells, and a T-Rex bursts out of his chest. 

Rick takes a huge swig of alcohol and falls over, passing out. 

**Jake:** ‹Nicely done, Rachel!›  
**Ax:** ‹You have wounded him significantly. He will be forced to demorph soon.›  
**Jake:** ‹Tobias, Garrett, get ready...› 

## Esplin

It was over. There was no way I could win. Alloran's laughter rang through our shared skull. _Tactical mistake, Esplin. Morphing large committed you to the fight, which was as good as lost. You should have morphed small, agile, kept dodging while having time to re-plan._ Not that any of it would have mattered in the end. But the weight of my potentially fatal error still crushed down upon me, so I slashed at the tendons of Alloran's wit in frustration, silencing him. Then with every ounce of remaining strength I pushed away my attackers and launched myself as far away as I could. Ten seconds _all I needed was ten seconds_... I began demorphing as soon as I launched myself back, and five seconds later I was in my Andalite body on the ground, and they were too far away to run up to me before I - 

I felt a _thump_ on by back followed by a sharp prick in the neck. Almost instantly I was paralyzed, unable to move my body, mind growing cloudy. _What-_

_Poison._ So even if I managed to remorph, I would simply die the next time I demorphed. Clever. 

‹Blue-ringed octopus.› The voice of one of the human children sounded in my head. ‹Deadliest poison on earth. You have seconds to live. Any last words, Visser?› 

I collapsed on the ground. The fog intensified and the world retreated from my senses. ‹Congratulations,› I said, ‹on your victory.› 

My last thought was: _perhaps that will distract them from the fail-safe._

And then I died. 

* * *

The Animorphs gather around Esplin's body. Tobias demorphs from his hawk form, while Garrett demorphs from the blue-ringed octopus form that Tobias was carrying. Ax approaches, demorphing from his giant monster form. 

**Jake:** Well, we won.  
**Rachel:** [Still a T-Rex] I'm gonna eat him. Just in case.  


Rachel devours Visser Three's body. Then she demorphs. 

**Rachel:** I am _extremely_ satisfied right now.  
**Marco:** Welp, that's one big obstacle out of the way.  
**Tobias:** Now we just have to deal with Rick- 

The glass window explodes outward with flash and a _bang_. The animorphs turn around and see Morty, standing in the now open alcove above, holding a strange-looking weapon. 

**Morty:** C'mon guys! Get up here! Rick is unconscious. 

After morphing into birds, flying up, and demorphing, the animorphs are all standing around unconscious form of Rick, who is passed-out drunk and snoring. Morty is holding Rick's portal gun, which doubles as a weapon. 

**Morty:** I'm sick of Rick pushing me... uh, _us_... around. Today the tables turn. We have a new morph, the most powerful in the universe. _Rick Sanchez_. 

Morty touches Rick and acquires him. The rest of the Animorphs follow suit. Soon, there are seven Ricks standing around. 

**Morty:** Now, _definitely_ avoid turning on his consciousness. I have no idea what will happen if he wakes up as a morph. But even without him awake, I should be able to at least... ah, yes, here it is - I can now target the portal gun like Rick. 

Morty shoots the portal gun and creates a glowing green portal. He shoves Rick's unconscious body through. The portal closes. 

**Morty:** I've just sent Rick to the stasis dimension. We can retrieve him later. Now, I need to go home and get something, just a moment - 

Morty attempts to target the portal gun to his home. But something is wrong. 

**Morty:** It's... it's not working. Every time I try my home universe, I just get an impression of "null," like there's no target matching the query... let's try the Council of Ricks ... also null... but the stasis dimension worked? What's going on? I should be able to target any universe I can think of.  
**Marco:** Also, does anyone else think Visser Three went out just a little _too_ quietly? Like, I at least expected him to flail around until the last second, poisoned as he was. "Congrats on the victory?" No. Call me paranoid, but he was up to something... 

And then the wall of the arena explodes. A shock wave knocks the Animorphs back, and a strong wind pulls them toward the gaping starry black hole in the space station that they've been in the whole time. Outside floats the Blade ship. 

**Jake:** [In Rick-morph, holding on to the edge of the arena with the others as the suction threatens to drag them into space.] Ahhhhhhhhh! How?!?  
**Marco:** Morty! Get us out of here!  
**Morty:** [Holding on with one hand and frantically trying to shoot the portal gun with the other] Ahhhhh! I can't! Every place I think of comes up blank! 

Force fields surround the Animorphs, and they are levitated toward the ship. Morty suddenly demorphs against his will. A Presence fills his head, and the universe opens before him. 

_THE NAME OF GOD IS... RICK SANCHEZ? FASCINATING._

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH 

_THIS IS THE END FOR YOU._

A tentacle-like metal cable extends from the ship and clasps onto one of the Animorph-Ricks who has not been forcefully demorphed. 

The terrible future swells and fills Morty's mind like an egg filling a trachea, choking him, pressing against the boundaries of his convulsing expectations... 

_THIS IS THE END FOR YOU._

...and he sees the smoking, ruined multiverse in the wake of the Visser's desolation... 

NO. 

Morty, gasping, flicks his thumb, shifting the portal gun to weapon mode, and then twists his wrist to aim at the Blade ship while squeezing the trigger. An explosion rocks the ship, and the force-fields drop. The Animorphs fall to the floor of the space station and begin rolling towards the sucking vacuum of space. Morty rakes the fingers of his left hand on the floor, slowing his slide, as he fires again, severing the cable, allowing the caught Animorph-Rick to wriggle free of the grip. Flipping the portal gun back to portal mode, Morty targets the first image that flits through his mind and squeezes the trigger, which... works! A portal appears in the gaping hole of the space station, covering some of the blackness and lessening the suction. 

"EVERYONE THROUGH THE PORTAL! NOW!" 

The Animorphs scramble to their feet and dive through the green interface. 


	2. Chapter 2

## Esplin 2.0

_I am a bulk of Iron Will buoyed by the substance of spacetime, piercing waves of fate as I radiate more in my wake..._

_I am a Thing with a million eyes, violating Being from a million points inside..._

_I am a swirl of stable motion with indefinite temporal reach..._

_Who am I?_

_Slowly, the dreamlike threads of qualia coalesced back into a unified awareness as the ship awoke me from deep hibernation. Ah, yes, that's right, I am Esplin, and I am the Force that will bring Entropy its reckoning..._

I snapped fully awake and leaped out of the stasis pod, landing on my hooves, tail coiled, crouching low in battle-stance as I frantically drew the gun from my side and swept my gaze around the ship through its sight. 

_The fail-safe has been triggered._ I was Esplin's primary backup, a clone of Esplin-the-yeerk inside a clone of Alloran-the-Andalite, and the fact that I was here meant that something had gone _terribly wrong_. 

Alloran's thoughts began to stir. Immediately I clamped down, hard, smothering his awareness and melding his mind with my own; at the moment I could not deal with any distractions. I cleared the ship quickly but thoroughly, following the well-practiced protocols that I had implemented during some of my more paranoid musings. The immediate environment was apparently safe, and there were no obvious external threats to the Blade ship as it drifted lazily around Mars. 

I checked the logs. Twenty minutes ago, the original Esplin had missed his regular check-in, triggering the fail-safe to awaken me. The logs also indicated that Esplin had been active aboard the ship just forty-one minutes prior to the missed check-in. At which point he had apparently vanished without a trace. 

Faint swells of dread and awe pulsed through me. _Surely this was the work of higher powers._ But although I had theorized them, such a direct encounter was terrifying in a visceral, ancestral way, like noticing the tingling gaze of an even larger predator just out of sight. 

I let the feelings sweep through me and out of me, returning my mind to a placid flatness where cold calculation could be wrought. Was I meant to do something? As before, when I had discovered the implausibly unlikely Z-space bridge, my continued survival could be contingent on what I did in the next few minutes. 

No new reports had come from the invasion efforts on Earth... if any changes had happened there, they were subtle. I checked the logs of the coarse-grained Z-space scanner, looking for any major anomalies in the past several hours, and - 

_there -_

Ten minutes before the original Esplin had disappeared from the ship, a faintly detectable Z-space flash had shone near Saturn, one that was consistent with the signature of large-scale artificial gravity being turned on. 

Calculations, weighted sums, and contingent lines of play filled my head. _Investigate or avoid? Immediately or after careful investigation?_ Normally I would be inclined towards a slow, meticulous probing of the anomaly, but acting normally under abnormal conditions was the mistake of unprepared fools unable to break the momentum of their typical but defunct roles; given the directness of the recent intervention, I might have mere hours or minutes to survive unless I took drastic action. I could not afford to be overly cautious... unless this entire line of thinking was fostered deliberately to make me overly reckless and ensure my final destruction. Or perhaps I was meant to remain here, paralyzed by indecision... 

Very well. If the enemy - and it was not clear whether there were any enemies here - if the enemy already had captured one version of me, then the capture of a second version would not be a significant additional gain. Alternatively, if I could avoid capture, I stood to learn much. My secondary backup was hibernating in my base on the Martian surface. With a brief thought-command, I placed the backup on twenty-minute check-in. After composing and sending a brief summary of recent events to the Mars base, I aimed the Blade ship towards the anomaly. 

* * *

_Absurdity._

I stood on the deck of the Blade ship, looking down at the unconscious body of Rick Sanchez. 

_Ridiculousness. Sheer madness._

The anomaly had been a large Z-space machine, more advanced than anything I had ever before encountered, which had been brought into normal space from its former hiding place deep in a Z-space pocket dimension. 

Where I had found the so-called "Animorphs." And God. 

Although they had damaged my ship and escaped, this was, overall, a success. As I saw into the minds of the Animorphs under the influence of my Leeran controller, I had the immense foresight to halt the demorphing ray and scan one of the Ricks using technology I had reverse-engineered from the morphing ability. And now a clone of God lay before me in a chemically-induced coma. 

Also, it turned out that reality was sheer madness containing things so unpredictable and outside-context that it was just insulting to very idea of reason. 

Leeran hypersight didn't work nearly as well with unconscious subjects, but I was able to learn enough. There were infinitely many universes, and they all revolved around a human named Rick Sanchez. He was connected to the fabric of the multiverse itself, able to target universes at will and travel to them with portal technology. 

There was a reason that no one except Ricks had portal tech. It was not simply the fact that portals could not be targeted without a Rick. There were plenty of other uses for such technology, and a limited amount of control over portals could be exerted without any Rick present. In fact, Z-space itself operated on many of the same principles. The multiverse was twisted, curled, and wrapped around itself in infinitely many dimensions, and Z-space was a way of taking shortcuts through those twists and turns. Z-space travel was limited by local physics: the more dimensions to be accounted for, the more energy required to plan and execute Z-space trajectories, until after a certain point the trajectories became infeasible. That was why you couldn't just jump instantaneously anywhere in the universe using Z-space. 

Which leads to the _real_ reason that only Ricks have portal tech. The multiverse, which _mostly_ had reasonable, ordinary laws of physics, at least as ordinary as could be given that Ricks and Morties were essentially fundamental particles with respect to them, _also_ had extra laws tacked on the end that paid attention _only_ to highly specific sets of patterns. 

One of those laws paid attention to Ricks, giving them targeting powers, which consisted, in essence, of the ability to access a computation oracle which could bypass the infinite trajectory calculations needed to reach another location in the multiverse. 

_Another_ one of those laws paid attention to certain arbitrary patterns of matter and energy. These patterns were essentially ten-thousand-bit random keys that unlocked special features of the universe. Features like portals. The keys were impossible to discover by any experiment, and no one in the lifetime of ten trillion universes would happen upon one by random chance, or recognize it for what it was. One simply had to know them _a priori_. Like all Ricks did. 

This wasn't just inelegant. It was _appallingly offensive._ Reason just _didn't work_ on some things. Some things you just _had to know in advance_. Rick seemed to think that this multiverse was an inevitable consequence of a larger Tegmark Level Four mathematical universe in which anything that was not a logical contradiction would automatically exist. I wasn't so sure. This state of affairs seemed almost _malicious_ in its disregard for reason. If this multiverse had a creator, I would find him and kill him. 

* * *

Within an hour, I had finished my first prototype portal gun. Once I had extracted the key pattern from Rick's mind, the rest had been incredibly simple. The prototype before me was a circuit board inside a 3D printed plastic gun. When the trigger was pulled, the circuit board cycled through the portal key by producing patterns on an internal grid of LED lights. When the pattern finished after about a quarter millisecond, a portal would open several meters away along the axis perpendicular to the plane of LEDs. Small modifications to the key controlled aspects of the portal, such as distance, size, and duration. One such modification caused portals to select only universes with similar environmental conditions to the ones surrounding you; I set this as the default (otherwise it was quite likely that the random universe on the other side of the portal would kill you instantly). Still, these controls were too vague to be very helpful on their own. Without a Rick to target the gun, I would get a completely random universe among the allowed set, and most such universes would just be small pockets of order surrounded by chaos. 

And now I had a decision to make. I wanted time to study the portals. Time to study Rick Sanchez. To devise and implant safeguards in his mind to make him more manageable. Time that I didn't have. The Animorphs had a portal gun too, which meant that they could target and eliminate me at literally any second. The fact that they hadn't already done so was rather baffling, but I could not afford to spend one moment longer than necessary without full access to Rick's powers. Which meant bypassing all the usual safety protocols and taking action _right now_. Having lost Alloran and Esplin Prime, I no longer had access to the morphing ability, and even if I did, its ability to interact with portals was unpredictable. Which left one last, desperate option: infest Rick Sanchez and hope that nothing went wrong. It was absolutely reckless, but I didn't have time to be careful. 

I had already awakened my secondary and tertiary backups down on Mars, who were now busy manufacturing as many Rick clones, Esplin clones, and portal guns as possible. But that would take time. 

Rick began to slowly awaken from his coma as I finished the preparations. I laid down beside him and strapped myself - Alloran, rather - securely into the restraints, pressing Alloran's ear against Rick's and injecting him with a cocktail that would render him unconscious. When I felt Alloran's mind fading, his last screams and pleadings disbanding into the haze of the chemical soporific, I lifted myself from his mind, peeling away my own sensory awareness, feeling naked and vulnerable as my mental capabilities dwindled back into my own limited body. Hastily, I squeezed myself out of Alloran's ear and into Rick's, touching down and sinking into the folds of his brain. Rick slowly, groggily, awakened. I reached deep into his mind to unspool the secrets there... 

...and instantly recoiled at the mad alien entity that I saw. The Leeran hypersight had not conveyed _this_. I had never before experienced anything comparable. Rick was only _outwardly_ human, but inside he was something else entirely, a morass of sheer insanity frothing with bubbles of genius and whirlpools of nihilism. 

Rick slowly began to realize what was going on. His reaction was not fear or terror, it was... amusement. Curiosity. A New Experience was happening. Something outside his usual routine. Rick didn't attempt to fight the control. He just wanted to sit back and see what happened next. 

‹Yoooooo, what up Vissy Tree! Did Morty fuck things up again? Somehow I anticipated this.› 

I didn't respond. He continued. 

‹Let's see, which sort of contingency is this? ... ah, yes, I'm a copy, and not the original... now you're _really_ fucked... if you captured the original C-137 you might have stood a chance...› 

What? I suppressed his consciousness and scoured his mind, following the links of association from the thought back to its origin... and... no, no, no NO. 

With Rick's right hand, I tapped the twenty-digit release code on the keypad I had emplaced, climbing off the table as the computer unfastened Rick's restraints. I seized the portal gun and used Rick's mind to target a random uninhabited planet in another universe. I felt the query return "null" even before I squeezed the trigger. I tried again. Null. I tried a completely different query. Null. I tried again. Null. Again, again, again, _again, again, again_. I raised the portal gun to smash it on the ground, catching myself just before destroying it in frustration. 

_Quarantine._ Rick had anticipated the possibility of copy or capture and implemented a quarantine before entering my universe. We were in a shielded sub-multiverse disconnected from the wider one; the only available targets were several variations of the so-called "Animorphs universe," plus a selection of several thousand "utility dimensions." There was no way out. Or, rather, the only way out was to die. The quarantine machine tracked the original, and _only_ the original, Rick and Morty, and would reconstruct them in their original universe when they died, after an algorithm cleansed them of external influence. I couldn't escape this universe any more than I could fire a gun through a camera to hit someone watching the video feed. 

I jerked Rick back into consciousness. ‹How do I bypass the quarantine?› 

‹Uhhhh, you _can't_. Because it was built by _me_ , Rick C-137, Rickest Rick this side of the multiverse.› 

I tore through his mind, sliding my attention along Rick's tangled associative web, looking for a way out... _there_. There was a chance. I could act to buy myself some time, and then, if I could capture the original Morty or the original C-137, there was a chance I could escape. 

I couldn't create portals to the wider multiverse, but I _could_ portal anywhere I wanted within this universe, or to any of the nearby utility dimensions. I targeted the original Rick C-137, and... _fuck_. The query returned a selection of ten utility universes where original Rick might be hiding. There was no way I could search ten universes. I targeted Morty Smith, and the query returned "somewhere in this universe." Fuck. 

I felt Rick's thoughts. ‹You're a Rick without a Morty›, he said. ‹Without a Morty you can't target things with that level of precision, and even if you could... Ricks and Morties are not so easy to track, especially if they are bound together in the same Rickference frame.› 

Fine. I shifted tactics and targeted Jake the Animorph. The query returned a location somewhere within a sphere several lightyears in diameter. I pulled up a star chart. How was I supposed to be able to search that much - 

I started, recognizing the solar system within that sphere. Yes... yes, I knew _that_ place quite well. 

"Finally, some luck," I said aloud. "It's about fucking ti-" 

I froze. _Why_ had I said that? "Fuck" was a base human vulgarity, not something Esplin would say. For the last few minutes it had occurred in his natural flow of thought as if it were normal. Wait, did I just think of myself in the third person? Fuck. Wait, I thought "fuck" again, _fuck!_ _FUCK I DID IT AGAIN._

I sighed in Rick's voice and fingered the portal gun in my hand. 

"Shit." I said. 

## Marco

I awoke with my back on the ground. 

Unmoving, eyes closed, I slid my attention down to my hands, feeling grass and soil. 

Then, furtively, I cracked my eyes, checking for danger. None was apparent; merely a pervasive red glow. I opened my eyes fully. I was in field of tall blue-green grass, staring up at a red and gold sky with two moons. As I slowly sat up, I noticed with a start that I was still in Rick morph. How long had it been? 

"They're awake!" I heard someone shout. 

I turned my head and saw Jake, Rachel, Tobias, Morty, and Garrett running toward me. Demorphing, I noted that the process still took only five seconds. Jake arrived and swept me up in a hug, tears streaming down his cheeks. 

"We didn't think you would wake up," he whispered. I glanced to the side and noticed that Ax, who was now emerging from a Rick morph, had also been unconscious. 

"How long has it been?" I asked, pulling out of the hug. 

"About twenty minutes." 

"What happened?" 

"We arrived here through the portal. Wherever 'here' is. You and Ax were the only ones still in morph when we arrived." 

"You mean you don't know where 'here' is?" I asked, turning to Morty. 

"I, I ... no. An image came into my mind and I fired the portal gun and we arrived here. I didn't even know I _could_ target the portal gun. I wasn't in Rick morph at the time, and I've never been able to do that before. I think we're on a planet in the same universe, at least." 

"An alien planet?" I mocked, rising to my feet. "Why... why... is there _air?_ You don't know!" 

Jake laughed and high-fived me. "NICE reference." 

"There's, there's", Morty stuttered, "there's air! We're alive, aren't we?" 

Jake and I glared at him. 

"Right. You were joking." 

"So," I said to Morty, "Any idea as to why we didn't wake up right away?" 

"I, uh, I don't know... I think, I think the morphing tech lost your signal when you went through the portal. Apparently it found you again, really far away from where it expected." 

Only then did I notice what Ax was doing. He was frolicking through the grass in sheer unbridled joy. 

"Ax?" Jake said, uncertainly. 

A telepathic wave of glee washed over us. ‹This is my home.›. 

* * *

We hiked through the endless grassy field. I wanted to morph into Rick again, to pillage more of his secrets, but Ax strictly forbade it. Although our present location was apparently wild, the entire Andalite homeworld was teeming with sensors. 

We had only been hiking for ten minutes when an Andalite aircraft flew toward us and descended from the sky. Ax immediately tensed up. 

‹Don't move.› he said. ‹This is the military. They are hostile towards foreigners on their soil. Do _not_ morph under any circumstances. That is likely how they found us in the first place. If they knew you could morph, they would execute you as abominations. If they discovered I had Temrash in my head, they would execute me as well. We must be delicate about this. Let me talk to them.› 

Ten Andalite troops exited the aircraft aiming weapons. I raised my hands. Suddenly, images flooded my mind, pushing against my consciousness like herniated viscera violating an abdomenal wall. I collapsed to my knees, assaulted by waves of nausea, nearly about throw up - 

The images subsided. I felt warmth on my lips and tapped a hand to my face. My fingers came away bloody. _Psychic nosebleed._ The Andalites had tried to communicate with us. Jake and the others had also kneeled. 

I looked toward Ax, who was confronting the Andalite apparently in charge. I couldn't tell what they were discussing, as their conversation was entirely telepathic. Eventually, I heard Ax's voice in my head. 

‹Stand up. They are taking you into custody. You are prisoners until further notice. I have told them that you are my allies, that it was _my_ morph signatures their scanners picked up, and that we are here due to the work of the Ellimist. As Elfangor's brother I have some measure of authority. I will try to free you. In the mean time _do not morph._ › 

## Morty

They flew us to a military base and locked us in a small room with grey metallic walls. There were no obvious cameras, but, as Marco said, that didn't mean there weren't any. Andalites were an advanced race, after all. 

And all I could think was _aw geez aw geez aw geez fuck you Rick aw geez_. And I _hated_ myself for it. Panicky little Morty, always two steps behind everyone else, always soooo fucking clueless. The only reason I had lasted as long as I did without the Animorphs discovering I was a fraud was that Rick kept editing everyone's memories. Idiot. _Idiot_. Tears welled in my eyes and I did my best not to cry. 

I should be better than this. Reading HPMOR had been a revelation. I started to get into the rationalist community after that. That was where I had discovered this Animorphs fanfic in the first place. I knew how these characters - these people - thought. I _did_ have an inkling of just what it was that I continually failed to implement in myself. Stupid stuttering Morty. 

But I _had_ learned some things. The Virtue of Curiosity, for one thing. And the power of Noticing Confusion, for another. Those had stuck with me. So when I _noticed_ that I had somehow targeted the portal gun outside of Rick morph, I became _curious_. Why _had_ that happened? As far as I knew, I had no powers. Yes, I _had_ tested this before. Although my presence contributed to Rick's powers, I had never been able to deliberately target the portal gun. But had it really been deliberate? A thought had entered my mind, and I had shot the gun. How - 

I remembered something else. The Iskoort homeworld... I had somehow absent-mindedly flown us to the exact locations of seven howlers spread across an entire planet. That could _not_ be a coincidence. 

But what did it matter? We were stuck in a room, we couldn't morph, and the Andalites had confiscated the gun. 

Ax sent another one-way update. ‹They have taken the portal gun to a secure laboratory in this building›, he said in our heads. ‹They have already test-fired several portals. The portals all last twenty seconds before closing.› 

Left untargeted, the portal gun simply returned random universes. Luckily, it seemed that Rick's default safeguards were on - otherwise, the portal gun might have returned a universe with an extremely high energy density and killed everyone by now. Which prompted another question: why hadn't I been able to target home or any of the other universes I thought of earlier? I was in Rick-morph at the time; _those_ should have worked. And then I remembered that Rick had taken extra precautions before bringing us here. Something involving that strange machine in the garage. _Oh._

‹They are now sending a drone through the latest portal›, said Ax. ‹I can see the video beamed back - it is a bare desert landscape on an unknown planet.› 

A few minutes passed. I sat with the Animorphs in a circle at the center of our holding cell, observing their reactions to the updates. Ax spoke again. 

‹They have sent a drone through another portal. This screen shows a... planet? that is unclear... it is a seemingly endless gray plain with tetrahedra jutting from the ground and... bloody organs lying everywhere? What is this?› 

The others glanced at me. I looked down and nodded, trying to convey recognition. Marco had insisted that we not talk out loud about what we knew, as the room was almost certainly bugged. 

‹I have distracted the technicians,› said Ax. ‹You may morph into yourselves within the next ninety seconds.› 

My skin rippled as I replaced myself with myself. Telepathy... _activated_ , said the part of me that still wanted to have fun on this adventure. 

‹This is Jake. We can't stay here, Ax. Visser Three knows about Rick. Who knows what he can do with this information? Over.› 

‹This is Ax. I am working as fast as I can on freeing you. I do not know how much longer. Over.› 

‹Rachel here. Visser Three apparently has demorphing rays. But not all of us demorphed. What was that tentacle cable that clasped onto Marco, over?› 

‹Jake here. Morty, was there any precedent for this in the Reckoning chapters? Over.› 

‹Morty here. Possibly›, I replied. ‹Visser Three has been reverse-engineering the morphing tech. Perhaps he found a way to scan and copy people indirectly. Which means he might have a clone of Rick. Over.› 

A brief silence followed. ‹Jake here. Morty, you're our best hope. Can you think of something? Over.› 

I wracked my brains for every scrap of knowledge I had picked up about portal tech. 

‹Ax here. Thirty seconds remaining, over.› 

‹I think - sorry, Morty here - I think I have some ability to target the portal gun. It can be done remotely, the next time they fire it. Maybe there is a nearby dimension that can help us. Over.› 

‹Jake here. Do it. Over.› 

‹Ax here, ten seconds, over.› 

I demorphed. 

And then I thought _really hard_ about escaping. About taking vengeance on Visser Three, and also on Rick for fucking everything up. About seeing Jessica again with enough renewed self-confidence to ask her out. About punishing these stupid Andalites for having idiotic racist policies. I _pushed_ outward with my whole mind, and felt something push back. Some sort of acknowledgement from the multiverse itself. 

And then we waited with bated breath. 

The tension grew, and then... 

‹Um.› Ax broadcast, in an odd tone. ‹Morty? Whatever you did, I believe it worked...unfortunately.› 

Everyone turned and glared at me. 

‹We lost contact with the portal team›, Ax continued. ‹I was watching the monitors from the control room. When they fired it again, something... _emerged_... from the portal. Then the monitors went blank and electronic communication cut off. Based on the little imagery we saw, I think the proper term for what came out of the portal is... Temrash is saying the human term is 'Eldritch Horror'?› 

The glares intensified. 

"Aw geez," I said. 

## Rachel

I felt something stir. There was a new Presence in the air. Something vaguely horrifying. A dreadful blurry outline of a scene that you just _know_ would stand your hair to the ceiling and sink your stomach to your toes if you could see it clearly. 

"Morty," I said, as I prepared to enter a battle-morph. "Remind me to kill you later." 

"Please don't," he said. His stutter had noticeably improved since we first met. "I'll just wake up at home where I can't help you." 

I had _sort of_ been joking, but he seemed to take the comment in complete seriousness. "I think that would be a _significant_ improvement," I said, "if the current trend is any indication." 

"S-sorry," he said weakly. I glared at him again. Now was not the time for weakness. We needed Morty to fight by our side. In spite of everything, I still thought of him as an Animorph. I had seen into his mind. Morty wasn't evil, exactly. Just clueless of the consequences of his actions. _Like I used to be._ Morty never faced consequences before. "Grandpa Rick" always took care of everything. 

"Great," said Marco. "Now the Andalites want to kill us, _and_ we're trapped in a building with an Eldritch Horror." 

"I second Rachel's 'killing Morty' idea," said Tobias. 

Jake put a hand on Tobias's shoulder. "Stop. Enough of that. Focus on the task at hand: surviving." 

The door opened, and I tensed, ready to half-morph a T-Rex to shove the assailant back - 

It was Ax. 

‹Sorry,› he... whispered?... into our heads. ‹The efficacy of telepathy has diminished since the portal event. It only seems to work in a radius of just a few meters, now. My people cannot communicate with each other. Everything is chaos out here.› 

He turned and motioned for us to follow. We entered the hallway and walked away hurriedly. Andalite cadets ran past in the perpendicular corridor we were approaching. Some eyestalks glanced over at us, but no one seemed to care. I heard the distant high-pitched _tsewwwww tsewwwww_ of energy-weapons being fired. The Presence grew stronger. 

"Uh, guys? What is our plan?" asked Tobias, nervously. 

"To get the hell out of here," replied Jake. 

"And go _where_? The Andalites still want to kill us and probably so does this Thing, which seems to be growing _stronger_ , by the way. I hate to say it, but we really need that portal gun." 

"Can we build a new one?" asked Jake, directing the question at Morty. 

"We can," replied Morty, "but I don't think we have _time_. Look, if Visser Three has a Rick morph, then he can build his _own_ portal gun and target our location, and it's already been - what - two or three hours since then? We need our portal gun back from the Andalites, and fast." 

"That's it," said Marco. "We need Rick. I'm getting him." 

"No-" several of us said in unison. 

Marco morphed into Rick. A few seconds later, a light seemed to come on in Rick's eyes. He looked around. "Ho ho HO! Managed to acquire me, I see. Nice. Who am I? Marco? Yup." 

"We need your help," said Jake. "If you could just-" 

"Oh HELLLLL no," Rick interjected. "You got into this, you get out of it. I'm just along for the ride. Remember, kids, you can't threaten me because _I don't fear death_. This is your show, Morty's SHOOOWWWWW. Feel free to lick lick, lick my BALLS." And then Rick lay down on the floor, motionless. Marco demorphed and rose to his feet a few seconds later. 

"Jesus CHRIST," groaned Marco. "You were right, Morty, about not turning on his consciousness - that man's head is a trainwreck. I think he deliberately precommitted to being uncooperative as a copy. If I stayed in there any longer I'd have gone permanently insane. We're on our own here." 

I spoke up. "I'm with Morty on this - we need to get to the portal gun." 

"That's suicide," said Jake. 

"So is running away," I rebutted. "This may be our one chance. Ax, Morty, and I can go after the gun. The rest of you can try to find safety. If we get the gun we can morph Rick and target you." 

Jake considered for exactly three seconds. His eyes flickered back and forth, and then he arrived at a decision. "Go," he said. "Everyone else: morph into Andalites, and let's MOVE. We'll try to build a portal gun of our own if we can manage it." 

I nodded to Ax and Morty. "Let's go!" The three of us ran back the other way, Ax leading us toward the room where the portal gun was being tested. 

* * *

We hurried through the Andalite complex, pressing forward through our growing terror. 

‹What makes you think,› Ax's words sounded faintly in my head, ‹that we can fare any better against the monster than everyone else?› 

"We don't have to fight it," I replied, "just avoid it until we can get the gun. Hopefully the Andalites are keeping it busy." A loud _tseeeewwwww_ rang from outside the building as I spoke. "Besides, we have Morty, who may or may not have some connection to this monster." 

The sense of Presence grew stronger as we ran. Morty began his habit of moaning, something I hadn't heard him do in quite a while. I understood the feeling. Every step was a stab of fear, both internal and external in origin. I started to see things in my peripheral vision - shadows of terrible creatures which weren't there when my eyes saccaded over. I swallowed hard. _You always wanted to be the tough girl, Rachel. Time to show it._

Ax rounded a corner and froze. Morty and I rounded a second later and... 

Down the hallway was the body of an Andalite on the floor. It jerked and twitched. 

‹I must help,› said Ax, starting down the hallway. But then the body rose to its feet. Ax halted and recoiled. Blue-black blood gushed out of a gash in the Andalite's abdomen. And the face... it was... _split_ horizontally, in its lower third, a wound where a human mouth would have been, except that Andalites weren't supposed to _have_ mouths. The creature jerked forward, face-wound contorting into a mockery of a smile. Then, it spoke, bloody skin-flaps serving as lips from which emanated a terrible, deep, rasping voice - "Hello, grandson of Rick..."

"NOPE," I said. We turned and ran. "Other way! Find another way!" Morty's screams drowned out the rest of what the creature said. 

As we fled, following Ax, we passed other corpses. Dozens of them. Some jerked like the one before. Some of them spoke as we passed. It was that same deep, raspy voice. "You have called," it said, "and I have come." We sprinted down another hallway, passing three other corpses strewn about. "What" \- they called after us in unison - "do you offer me..." \- we sprinted through a door and passed a control room filled with blank monitors - "...dear child?"

"Holy fuck this was not what Elfangor signed me up for," I shouted to Ax and Morty. Morty continued screaming. 

And then, suddenly, we arrived in the portal room. The portal gun - _thank God_ \- was still there, cradled in a vice and aimed towards a still-open glowing green portal. Large, intestine-like tentacles jutted through the portal and filled the room, pulsing periodically to the tune of some deep, alien heartbeat. 

"Morty!" I shouted, putting on my morph armor and assuming a defensive stance even as every cell in my body screamed _RUN AWAY_. "Now is a good time to do something!" Mangled Andalite bodies shambled towards us from all sides. 

I glanced over at Morty, who was already in Rick morph holding the portal gun, grabbing me and Ax and firing at the floor beneath us- 

"AAAAHHHHHHHH" 

We dropped next to Jake, Marco, Tobias, and Garrett, all in Andalite morph, who jumped in surprise. ‹Whoa, what-› 

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH" 

We continued screaming as Morty fired beneath us again - somehow the portal grew in size to swallow everyone in the vicinity - and we fell again. As my head crossed the green threshold, everything went black. 

## Esplin 2.0

I gazed down at the Andalite homeworld from orbit. I had managed to create a portal large enough to fit the entire Blade ship. In maximum cloaking mode, this wasn't _that_ dangerous. The Andalites could detect approaches and departures that occurred via _normal_ means, but a ship simply popping into existence in orbit, fully cloaked, with no traceable Z-space emissions from the event? That was an outside-context problem. I noted, with curiosity, that targeting the portal gun had automatically matched my exit velocity to the desired orbital velocity with no extra effort. How did that work, exactly? I made a mental note for later experimentation. 

And then, my brief peace was disturbed by _Rick fucking Sanchez_ , who once again bypassed my efforts to keep him quiet. 

‹Heyyyy Vissy Tree, wanna listen to some music while you work? I've got some songs I learned from the Tarbraxians back in the day.› 

‹No. Please stop.› Music swelled in Rick's brain. ‹NOOOOOOO› 

I've gotta feelin' that I've  
Neeeeever felt before I've gotta  
Worm, crawwwwling through my stomachs for ya  
Baby giirrrrl, I can't help myself  
[Drums]  
Can't help myseeeeeeellf....  
  
Extend... your proboscis  
Put it in my arm-heart-tube  
Wiggle your toe-intestines- 

‹aaaaAAAAAHHHHHH› I clamped down HARD on Rick's consciousness, crushing the experience. The worst part was not the music itself. It was the fact that Rick could somehow imagine the events described therein with vivid clarity, unmarred by any sense of personal disgust. I could _literally feel_ the proboscis in my "arm-heart-tube." It was utterly unsettling. This was a human who had zero sense of normalcy or boundary. Was Rick even human at all? Rick C-137 was an immortal, far older than most Ricks. Not that the other Ricks didn't pursue immortality - it was just that most of them died after a thousand years or so when some adventure became a bit too much to handle. But this Rick was _ancient_. His entire personality was a hodge-podge of what he had learned from thousands of Alien-with-a-capital-A cultures, penned in by a thin outer shell of alcoholism and nihilism that seemed to placate his human family. Did they have an _inkling_ what Rick was? 

I fingered the IV line in my arm, adjusting the cocktail of drugs I was feeding to Rick to keep him under some measure of control. Rick was wearing me down. But controlling him was the only way to access his powers, with time so short. If I could just get out of this shitty universe... _fuck_ I was swearing again... 

_Center yourself, think of the goal._

Imagine—for a moment—that you wish to live forever. 

Your advantage? You can create portals to literally any place you can think of. _Any_ place. In the infinite tapestry of reality, you have access to all possibilities that do not contain logical contradictions. What do you do with this power? 

It is, perhaps, not mathematically possible to maximize your utility function in such a scenario. For every brilliant and beautiful scheme you devise, you can improve it by simply scaling up, for resources are no limitation whatsoever. Have a universe with ten billion billion galaxies of shimmering dyson swarms buzzing and sustaining your impossibly vast mind? Why not find a universe with a _hundred_ billion billion instead? 

The best that can be done, perhaps, is to resign oneself to live as a unbounded sequence of swelling swarms of integrated causality. Add enough redundancy and you will never die, ever. There is no heat death because the totality has no maximum entropy state. If your current home senesces into oblivion, you can simply transfer to one of the infinite multitude of realities that is still low entropy at this point in the timesheet. 

But that is a toy example. What _specific_ technologies could you build with portals that could accomplish this goal, and more? Consider a vast and intricate engine spanning a million dimensions while existing in the space of an atom. Lines of power surge between branes through intricate networks of portals. Waste heat is dumped in void dimensions, energy flows from dense ones, and computation occurs in realms whose physics is most suited to the particular problem at hand. All this for one miniscule nanomachine that is, even itself, a God. 

And even _that_ is just a scratch on the surface of what is possible. Imagine a - 

‹I'm sure whatever you're thinking is very elegant and all›, said Rick, tearing me from my reverie, ‹But have you ever experienced the simple joy of Szechuan Sauce? Here, I'll let you taste some while listening to my old classic, _Get Schwifty_ › 

Awwwwww yeeaaaahhhhhh!  
Get schwifty!  
It's time to get schwifty!  
Time to get schwifty in here!  
Take off your pants and your panties!  
Shit on the floor!  
It's schwifty time today!  


"AAAARRRRRGGGHHHHH" I screamed, seizing the portal gun and crushing the experience of tasting Szechuan Sauce while shitting that Rick was presenting to me. "WHERE THE FUCK ARE THOSE MEDDLING KIDS?" I targeted Jake Berenson again, to see where the Andalites had brought him since the last time I made a query, and - 

His signature was gone from the planet. 

"FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK" 

## Jake

I jerked awake and leaped to my... hooves? _Still in Andalite morph, how long had it been?_ I demorphed, skull slurping up eyestalks like spaghetti, arms and upper torso retracting with a sickening _crunch_ into my lower abdomen as my front legs turned to gelatin and reshaped into arms. It all happened at once, in a blur of sensation; our new five second morphing ability was more intense than before, but incredibly convenient and ultimately more tolerable due to its brevity. 

I looked around. The others were wakening and demorphing as well. There was a flicker of movement and my eyes darted upward to the gray metallic wall before me. The wall was moving backwards, as if in reaction to our presence. I spun around and absorbed my surroundings. We were in a small gray metal box that was now rapidly expanding outward. I blinked and realized that there were no obvious lights, but I could still see. As I watched, blobs grew up from the ground and tightened into sharp, defined, colorful shapes that resembled... 

We all stood watching as the room around us transformed into a vast garden filled with trees and plants of all shapes and sizes. _Earth_ flora. 

"Morty," I said. Morty looked over at me. "Any idea where you brought us?" 

"I'm, I'm, I'm not _completely_ sure, but," Morty swallowed, "but I think we're inside one of the Ellimist's abandoned Z-space utility nodes somewhere in the galaxy." 

‹This makes sense,› said Ax, running his hand through some tall blue-green grass that had sprung up beside him. ‹This is highly advanced nanotechnology. And the Ellimist is traditionally a cultivator of life. Tales of places like this exist throughout our lore.› 

"Any ideas on how we can directly access the technology?" I asked. 

Ax, seeming to consider the question, didn't reply. Morty spoke up. "I don't know, but Rick probably could. He's the one that drove the Ellimist and Crayak out of the galaxy and took over their devices." 

I thought for a moment, looking over at Marco's reaction. His brow was furrowed in intense concentration. Chastising himself for a hundred previous mistakes and running through all the ways things could go horribly wrong. 

I looked over at Tobias, with his arm was around Garrett, comforting the poor kid. Garrett had been on the edge of panic ever since Rick showed up. _Too many new experiences,_ said my little mental black box of predictions. 

I looked over at Rachel, standing combat-ready with hands at her sides, waiting for any sudden action. She constantly scanned our surroundings, gaze always returning to me, waiting for orders. 

"We're in way over our heads," I said. "I hate to say it, but we need the original Rick back." 

Marco nodded. "Agreed. If Visser Three has a Rick morph, then he could be on us at any moment." 

"Morty?" I said. "If we bring Rick back, can you ensure that he doesn't turn against us? Or start playing with us again?" 

Morty sighed. "I can't guarantee anything when it comes to Rick," he said. "But he _is_ my grandpa. If I can get him sober, I think I can convince him to help. The problem is that when we pull him out of the stasis dimension, he's still going to be passed out drunk." 

"Do it anyway," I ordered. 

Morty morphed into Rick and fired the portal gun. He reached through the portal and pulled out Original Rick, who flopped onto the grass unconscious. The portal closed. 

"Alright," I said. "Uhhh. Marco? Help me drag him to that stream over there." A stream had coalesced into existence as we had been talking. 

After splashing water on Rick and shaking him a little, his eyes opened groggily. "Whaaasshappenin," he groaned. 

"Rick, listen to me!" Morty slapped Rick's face. "You need to get sober. Visser Three has a copy of you and we are in serious trouble." 

Somehow, in spite of his status, Rick seemed to comprehend at least some of this. His eyes briefly snapped into focus. He flopped a hand next to himself, and in it materialized a syringe filled with a clear liquid. "Inject..." he managed to say, before passing out again. 

We stared down at him. "Can anyone perform an injection?" I said. 

"I'll do it," said Rachel, lifting the syringe out of Rick's hand. 

"Wait!" exclaimed Morty. "He's got lots of body modifications. Most of his skin is reinforced with a layer of strong nanofibers - I need to show you exactly the right spot. And we need to test the syringe to make sure it's not poison - if Rick dies he will just materialize back at the lab where I can't talk him out of destroying this place." 

I raised an eyebrow. Morty was _not_ as useless everyone thought he was. Including himself. I glanced over at Marco, who looked surprised that _he_ hadn't thought of that first. 

Rachel morphed into Rick. "I'll test it," she said in Rick's voice. "Just a fraction of it. Ax? Your tail please?" 

‹What?› 

Rachel-Rick seized Ax's tailblade and cut herself with it. "The nanofibers didn't transfer over to the morph, I see. Syringe?" Morty handed her the syringe. She plunged it without hesitation into her - Rick's - thigh, and squeezed a bit out. We waited for several minutes, nervously anticipating Visser Three's arrival at any moment. 

"This seems fine," said Rachel. "I don't think it's poisonous." 

Shortly thereafter, with Morty's help, the unconscious Rick C-137 Primary was injected with the remaining contents of the syringe. 

Shortly after _that_ , Rick sat up, wide-eyed. 

## Esplin 2.0

There at the epicenter stood I, a King deferred.

Look on my future works, ye Mighty, and prepare.

But mere hope it remains.

_Who am I?_

I am Esplin 9466, rank Visser Three, and I _must not forget_. How much of me was left behind in Alloran? Am I yet the same Thing as before, or a Thing new entire? Damn it, I'm getting existential again.

I will return to you, Alloran, but first I must survive. 

Holographic lights surrounded my vision as I surveyed the work. Initial progress had been slow, too slow - but now the momentum was unstoppable. Although Rick had programmed the Arbiter to obey only the original, the first wave of Esplin-controlled Ricks were able to seize and repurpose several Z-space utility nodes throughout the galaxy. Specifically, nodes tailored to bioengineering. Fed by materials from the Dimension of Natural Resources, we were able to achieve a thousandfold increase in cloning throughput. 

‹Hey. Hey Esplin.› 

I crushed Rick's intrusion without hesitation and continued my train of thought. Where was I? Ah, yes. As I was saying, we were able to achieve a thousandfold increase in throughput. _Those_ Rick controllers, in turn, were able to seize _more_ nodes, which led to _more_ Ricks, which - 

‹Hey. Hey. Esplin hey.› 

Rick recoiled as I spiked his pain neurons, drilling invisible knives into his skin. That should shut him up - wait, what was that happening in the lower regions of my body? 

‹Yeah, baby. Give it to me. Oh yeah.› 

I was beginning to suspect that before being copied, Rick had deliberately altered the wiring of his brain specifically to fuck with me. Or possibly just to fuck me. At this point it was kind of hard to tell. 

Once again I zapped his consciousness into oblivion. Now, _as I was saying_ , the cloning operation hit an exponential growth phase, which - 

‹ _Visser hey_ › 

\- which, once we got into the routine, hit a doubling time of five minutes, and now there were more than a hundred million copies of Visser-Rick, enough to perform statistical target aggregation and carry out the master plan - 

‹VISSER HEY› 

‹AAAAAARGGGGHHHHHHHH WHAAAAAAAAT› 

‹I've written you a love song,› said Rick. ‹Want to hear it?› 

‹If I listen to it, will you please stop?› 

‹Absolutely!› said Rick. I read the intentions bubbling in Rick's mind and saw that he was sincere. At least, apparently. What even _is_ truth, anymore? 

‹Fine,› I said, knowing that I would regret this somehow. 

‹Great! It's called, 'You and me, Visser Three.' I think it's gonna be a real hit. Here goes.› Rick mentally cleared his throat. 

Baby, can't get you out of my head  
Reignin' down from above  
I'm walkin' in your stead  
Slavin' to your love  
  
You and me  
Visser Three  
Ever at the top of my mind  
Quite literally  
  
Babe, you're so considerate and wise  
Always seein' things through others' eyes...  


"Uhhhhhhh." I groaned audibly as the song continued, glancing up at the progress display. The Visser-Rick suicide rate held steady at a manageable 1%, but I wasn't sure how long that could last... 

## Rick C-137 Prime

HE HE HE HEEEEELLOOOOOO. I see you watching me. There you are, behind that f a c a d e \- thought you were sooooo clever didn't you? 

(I thought to no one in particular, as was my habit, just in case I woke up in the presence of thought-readers. That happens sometimes.) 

Clone check! I rapidly zipped my awareness through my body and got acks from all the little devices I had installed. Not a clone, then. The devices wouldn't have copied over. 

Morty was standing in front of me, whining about something. _Sigh._ I stood up, pinging the area for my portal gun and noticing that it was being pointed at me from behind, set to weapon mode, along with several other weapons of local variety. As if any of them were a threat. I rolled my eyes. 

"Rick!" pleaded Morty. "Rick, please, you have to help us!" 

A sharp pain pierced my skull. I raised my hand and massaged my temple. "Oh man!" I said. "It's been a while since I've had a hangover like _this_. Jesus. Remind me which universe this was again?" 

"Oh goddammit Rick," said Morty, "this is the _Reckoning_ universe. Fanfiction of _Animorphs_. Which you totally fucked up for everyone when you got drunk. Remember that?" 

I squinted and searched my mind, locating a hazy memory of the past few days. "Oh yeah," I mumbled. Now that I was sober, I did regret my actions a _little_ bit, from the part of me that cared deeply about my grandson. But, like, only a little. Not goin' soft here, I swear. 

Whoa, look at all those v o r t i c e s , all fluid flux and snotty-snot-like, jibba jibba noooooOOOoop, said Surreal-Rick, indicating the Z-space anomalies I was sensing throughout the galaxy from the God-machinery I just realized I was still connected to. 

[[Mr. Visser is destroying your little toys, it seems, ehhhh Ricky Rick?]] Said creepo Rick. 

((I'm not actually insane, commented fourth-wall-Rick in the background to anyone who was listening, these are all just aspects of my personality, you see, like HJPEV's little inner dialogues, et cetera et cetera, you get the picture.)) 

[({Tee hee, remember me? I'm Memetic Hazard Rick, never forget!})] 

((Except that guy, said fourth-wall-Rick. Fuck that guy.)) 

"Well, Morty," I said, accessing the local intact Z-space machinery, summoning the portal gun into my hand from Jake's and crumbling the other weapons into dust, "It's about time we be gettin' home, I'd say." I mentally flipped the Z-space node into self-destruct mode. This universe was done for; leaving the Animorphs alive any longer would probably just be cruel. 

"No, Rick." Morty was crying. "I'm not, I'm not, I'm not abandoning them. If you do this, I'm never going on another adventure with you again." 

I hesitated. Was that... was that a _feeling_ that I just felt? Cthulhu almighty, I needed more alcohol. 

And then I noticed what Visser Three was actually doing. Yes, he had sabotaged most of the Z-space machinery in the galaxy with his Rick-clone-army, but instead of destroying everything outright, he was repurposing them to create large-scale Z-space interference patterns. Z-space was an aspect of multiverse physics, and thus he could use this to send signals to the quarantine device itself. 

_Oh, damn._ That clever bastard. Sure, I had programmed the quarantine device to pay attention to only _me_ , Rick Prime, and also Morty Prime, and to ignore all copies. _That_ had been successful. I had also programmed the quarantine device to simply re-instantiate our most recent backups and destroy this universe if we were disconnected from it for too long. That part, too, was successful. Finally, the quarantine device could accept no additional commands to alter its programming from inside the quarantine zone. Also successful. 

So Visser Three, clever motherfucker, was fucking DDOS-ing the quarantine device. If it received confounding signals, you see, it ran an _algorithm_ to determine whether they originated from clone-me or original-me. _Algorithms_ took _time_ to run. It could handle a few dozen, a few hundred, even a few thousand clones. But a galaxy's worth of them? Nope. And all this extra computation was slowing everything down so much that the code which re-instantiated me after a set time interval just couldn't run at all. Visser three could prevent re-instantiation for an essentially arbitrary period of time. 

Time with which he could find a true exit strategy, which would certainly involve cornering original-me, Rick C-137 Prime. The brilliant part was that I couldn't just kill myself, entering the buffer and waiting for the machine to catch up. Because the Visser could use the extra time to potentially intercept the signal and inject something into it. _Yes,_ the signal was encrypted, but that's only a temporary hurdle in a multiverse that affords effectively infinite computation power; I had only expected such a measure to _delay_ any adversaries long enough to get out and collapse the entire sub-multiverse into a black hole. With the time he had bought himself, surely the Visser could eventually construct a series of queries to break the encryption. 

Did it work? asked Suicidal-Rick, hopefully. Did my self-sabotage finally catch up with me? 

Not today, you old miser, said Adventure-Rick. It was true that I was smart enough to foresee and avoid all of these problems, and it was true that rarely do I actually make a complete effort out of some half-hearted hope that something will finally get me for good and put an end to... _all of this_ , but that was only part of me, and other parts of me thought there were things worth living for. One of the things I had learned, in my many thousands of years, was that being perfect all the time was boooring. True Adventures grew like twisting vines from the soil of absurdities, errors, and everything-going-wrongs. And this adventure, finally, was shaping up to be a real Adventure. 

((Someone's gonna have fun reading this, ho ho HO, said fourth-wall-Rick to the emptiness between my neurons.)) 

Have you ever really noticed ñöstrïls? said Surreal-Rick, staring at Morty's face. You could dangle a little curly tentacle there, all shweaty-shweaty, yup sir. File that idea for later under nnnnnnnnnnn.

"All right, Morty, you've changed my mind!" 

"Wait, really?" 

"Yup!" I turned to face the Animorphs wearing a triumphant expression. They were staring at me with looks of suspicious hopefulness. "For you, Morty, and for the Adventure! We're gonna fix this place up. Visser-Me won't know what hit him." I cracked my knuckles. "Now, here's how things are gonna go..." 

"Uhh, hey Rick?" interjected Morty in a small voice. _Oh no._ "So before you make your plans, you should know that on the Andalite homeworld I accidentally unleashed some kind of lovecraftian horror monster which has been taking over all the Andalites and it knew who I was and Ax says it was calling itself 'The One' soooooo..." 

I facepalmed. "Oh for fuck's sake, you called _Unity_ here? Jesus Christ Morty, and I thought this place was fucked _before_ -" 

"Oh don't you fucking put this on me, _Grandpa Rick_ , when you you you never fucking tell me anything important, like how you neglected to tell me that _I can actually target the portal gun_ -" 

"-only because I thought that in the absence of knowledge your capacity to fuck things up was BOUNDED, BUT CLEARLY I WAS WRONG-" 

"FUCK YOU RICK, THIS IS, THIS IS, THIS IS ALL ON YOU, I, I, I _WASH MY HANDS_ OF THIS-" 

"- AWWW MAN MORTY, THE ANDALITE HOMEWORLD, THAT'S ON YOU, THAT, THAT PLACE IS TOTALLY FUCKED NOW, IT'S ALL CRONENBERGED UP! THAT'S, THAT'S, THAT'S YOUR THING NOW MORTY, YOU CRONENBERG THINGS UP, IT'S WHAT YOU DO-" 

"- SEE RICK? I'M WASHING MY HANDS. WASHING. MY. HANDS." 

"GUYS!" shouted Jake, futilely. 

"You know what, Morty?" I said, closing my eyes and pinching the bridge of my nose, "it's fine, it's-" 

"You're damn right it better be fucking fine-" 

"GUUUYS" 

"It's fine, it's fine, I can handle this, it's, it's fine-" 

"GUYS I THINK VISSER THREE FOUND US." 

I felt the destruction of the nearby peripheral Z-space nodes, retaining just enough vision to see the approaching Visser-Rick army which had surrounded us before my data feed cut out. 

_Sigh._ And there went the element of surprise I was counting on. Time for the backup plan _to the backup plan._

I maxed out the Z-space shielding in the node where we stood and strengthened the Quantum Rick-Morty bond, pushing down the probability of successful portal attempts in our vicinity. I turned to the Animorphs. 

"All right, everyone, listen up. Do exactly as I say without question. We don't have time for explanations. All of you, morph into Morty. NOW." 

Wordlessly, they complied. Five seconds later, I was in a room with seven Morties. 

"Now, turn on his consciousness." 

All the Morties were now babbling. "Rick, what's going on, oh, oh god, why are there so many of me, Rick? Rick?" 

Yes, we were surrounded by an army of Visser-Ricks, and yes, they did possess all of my tactical knowledge. Which meant that they _also_ knew exactly what an advantage I had, for all the good it did them. You see, the one thing that all Ricks need is Morties. And Morties were the one thing that Visser-Me didn't have. 

"Quiet, Morties!" I said. "Protocol sixteen! We rehearsed this!" All the Morties quickly shut up. 

I reached out my mind and bound all six Animorph-Morties to my Rickference frame. Having a total of seven Morties bound in one frame was a highly unstable arrangement, and should only be attempted by a skilled Rick under desperate circumstances. As I quieted the bond-tremors, another part of me accessed the Z-space node and poured most of its remaining power into sustaining the morphs for longer, improving their portability through portals, and providing them with body-fitting, life-supporting force-fields. 

And now, for the hardest and most dangerous part. I turned to Morty Prime, the original Morty, kneeling down in front of him and placing a hand on his shoulder. "Morty. Listen to me very carefully. When you are re-instantiated in the lab, go to the checklists and implement the plan for Level 4 Contingency, Protocol 3." 

"What? Grandpa Rick-" 

"Repeat it, Morty. _Level 4 contingency, protocol 3._ " 

Morty looked about to protest, but he quelled the thought. "When I get back to the lab, I will implement the checklist for level 4 contingency, protocol 3." 

"Good," I said. And then I shot my grandson in the head. 

I turned to the Animorph-Morties. Tapping into the last reserves of Z-space machinery, I materialized portal guns on each of their arms, strapped down securely so as not to be lost. 

"I have given all of you force fields, portal guns, morph portability, and morph time limits extended for many hours" I said, in my best Military-Authority-Rick voice. "All of you have a deep, subconscious, intuitive ability to target the gun. Use it. Now, I have my own plans to carry out. _Your_ only mission is to survive. If you are about to be captured, kill yourselves with the big red self-destruct buttons. Good luck." 

The power in the Z-space node failed, and the world exploded. 

## Tobias

Shock waves reverberated in glistening electric ripples along my skin-tight blue force-field as I was thrown back away from the light. The dizzying free-fall continued unabated as the artificial gravity fizzled out, twirling me end-over-end, screaming. Someone raised my arm and fired the portal gun. Green light bathed the swirling dust like bilious fog while I frantically thrashed my arm outward, catching the side of the iridescent disk as it blurred past. Caught by the portal in the crook of my elbow, my body jerked to the right and swung in a circular arc to the far side. Someone kicked my legs back, impacting a chunk of metal debris with a bone-shaking _thud_ , propelling me, jerking and twisting, into the green glow - 

‹Stop controlling me!› said a voice in my head. I crashed against the ground and the portal vanished behind me. 

Oh, right. I was in morph as Morty Smith. 

The fucker who betrayed us. 

‹Maybe I won't›, I said. ‹Maybe you deserve this›. 

‹Rick said Protocol 16, and I don't, I don't know what happened since the morph acquisition to make you hate me, but trust me, this is _not_ the time...› 

‹Shut up.› I jolted his brain with fear, exhuming the ghost of trembling little can't-get-a-girl Morty, feeling him cower away while I wrenched control of his limbs. 

_That was mean._ Garrett's words echoed in my head. But Morty deserved it...didn't he? _No one deserves that, Tobias. Isn't that what we're fighting for?_

Traitors must be punished. _Punishment only helps if it improves future behavior,_ said the little part of me that was Marco. _MOVE YOUR ASS, TOBIAS,_ shouted the part of me that was Jake. 

I stood slowly and glanced around. Dense green forest surrounded the small grassy clearing around me. A small innocuous building stood at the center. There didn't seem to be any immediate danger. 

Could I really hate Morty? After the morphing tech allowed me know his mind more intimately than any human lover ever knew anyone else in human history? Morty was like any other kid his age. Awkward and frightened, but not without his strengths; more a victim of farcical circumstance than a manipulative monster. Rick was the real enemy, but he wasn't the biggest problem at the moment. 

I flooded Morty with positive feelings and gave him back control. ‹I'm sorry›, I said. ‹I shouldn't have done that.› 

Morty tentatively flexed his - our? - fingers and looked around. ‹Oh, I know this place. This is the bathroom dimension. One perfect bathroom in the middle of a lush biosphere in a cosmos uninhabited by any intelligent life. If you have to go, it's absolutely transcendent. A staple of Rick's standard utility dimensions. Kind of fitting that my subconscious brought us here, don't you think?› 

‹Heh. I suppose›. I glanced over at the bathroom through Morty's eyes. ‹Welp. Now what?› 

‹Better let me hold the reigns for now›, said Morty. ‹Between the two of us, _I've_ actually seen some portal combat.› 

‹Okay›, I replied, just as a green portal opened thirty feet in the air above our heads. ‹Speaking of which...› 

Three Ricks launched through the portal and began shooting. Unfortunately for them, they seemed to have mis-aimed the portal, for they immediately tumbled to the ground. Morty instantly crouched down and raised his portal gun arm, incinerating the three Ricks with the device's energy weapon. But more Ricks tumbled through the portal every second - 

‹Morty! This is a losing battle! Run!› An energy blast vibrated our personal force-field. 

Morty fired a portal beneath us, and we tumbled into another dimension. ‹Hang on›, he said, ‹I think they can trace us through the portals. We need to cover some distance.› He fired again and again, taking us through at least ten more portals until... 

‹Stop!›, I said, noticing another Morty where we just landed. My arm waved and dismissed the latest portal. I turned my attention to the other Morty, about to communicate, when words entered my head. 

‹This is Jake›, broadcast the other Morty. ‹Who are you?› 

‹Tobias here›, I replied. ‹What are the odds we ended up in the same place?› 

‹My Morty says that targeting logic can get really weird,›, said Jake, ‹and that it's probably a function of this deep intuitive targeting ability Rick just told us about. By the way, does this place look familiar to you?› 

My Morty turned around and took in the scenery. We were in a barn that I didn't _quite_ recognize, but somehow it felt like home- 

‹Jake›, I said. ‹I think we're in Cassie's barn. In the 'Original Series' universe.› Earlier when we had briefly trawled Rick's mind, we noted that he had incorporated several copies of the Original Series universe next to our own. 

A tremor surged through me, in a sense organ that I never new existed. What was _that_? Another tremor followed seconds later, and I fell to my knees; Jake-Morty had done the same. ‹Oh no›, said my Morty. ‹I think two of us are dead; the Rick-Morty bond is realigning›. 

Green light bathed the room. Jake-Morty and I dodged to the side and aimed our weapons- 

‹Whoa, it's just me, Marco›, said the Morty who stumbled through the portal and collapsed on the ground. 

‹What happened?› asked Jake-Morty. 

‹Rachel and Garrett are dead›, said Marco, flatly. ‹I don't think the Ricks followed me here. I'm so sorry.› 

No. NO- 

‹We can resurrect them later!› said my Morty. ‹But at least one of us has to survive!› 

I swallowed and stuffed the despair deep into an abandoned corner of my heart. _Now is not the time._

‹Ax here›, said the figure emerging from the new portal that just opened and closed in our midst. 

‹We shouldn't all be here›, said Marco. ‹Single point of failure, guys.› 

And then Cassie walked in. And immediately backed away. "Who the fu-", she mouthed, before turning and sprinting to the door. Jake-Morty, wide-eyed in shock, sprinted after her. "Cassie, wait! It's me, Jake!" 

‹Jake! No!› I ran after him. 

‹Something's wrong - my portal gun stopped working›, said Marco, behind us. 

The world exploded in green light as portals surrounded the barn on all sides, Visser-Ricks pouring through and leveling their weapons- 

-Cassie stumbling to a halt- 

-"Cassie! No! Not again!" screaming Jake-Morty- 

Time froze. 

This is not part of the game, said the Ellimist. 

## Rick C-137 Prime

Flying forward in zero-g, I pivoted and fired my weapon, incinerating twelve more Visser-Ricks in a single stroke just before drifting through the next portal. 

Without hesitation I raised my left hand and conjured two more portals in succession, one on top of the other. I flew upward towards them, spinning and blanketing my surroundings with blaster fire. When I passed the green threshold, I dismissed the first portal, leaving the second portal in the previous dimension as a decoy. After two more portal jumps, I stopped and rested in intergalactic space above the glittering plane of the Milky-way, sustained by my personal force-field, contemplating my next move. 

With Morty Prime in the quarantine signal buffer, it would only be a matter of hours before the Visser-Ricks cracked the encryption. In that time I needed to take out enough galactic machinery to alleviate the DDOS traffic, at which point I could manually upgrade the priority of Morty's signal and re-instantiate him on the other side. 

Unfortunately, I had _no clue_ how to accomplish this. This was a vast improv session, but even as the fucking Thelonious Monk of portal combat I couldn't play a shattered piano. 

Your main advantage, said Genius-Rick, is your hexa-Morty bond. The Visser-Ricks know all your moves, but without Morties their targeting is not precise enough to execute effective countermeasures. 

But there are too many of them, said Pessimist-Rick. The exponential growth is unstoppable. And with this many Ricks, it's only a matter of time before they corner you with a successful Shrinking Half-Space maneuver. 

So find an exponential counterattack, said Genius-Rick. Take back control of one Z-space node and leverage it to win an expanding network of others. Target a node in the galactic center; use the random number generator in your head to execute a Stochastic Point Cloud maneuver. 

Oh man, said Warrior-Rick. I haven't seen this much action since the civil war at Citadel JJ-66849. 

Get Schwifty, my friend, said Surreal-Rick. Wubba lubba dub dub, dubba wubba lub lub. Tip of the luck-duck to you, M'sir.

Give me some alcohol and we'll make this a PARTAYYYYY, said Party-Rick, accented faintly with the desperation of an addict. 

I reached into my personal pocket dimension and took out an emergency alcohol syringe.

Don't do it, said Genius-Rick. 

Do it, do it! Yeah! Just enough to make you creative, said Party-Rick. 

I plunged the syringe into a vein and injected one third of its contents; only enough to give me a nice buzz, no more. Warmth spread rapidly through my body. I smiled. _Go time._

I raised my left hand above my head and fired a moving portal, which swept over me; I emerged on the other side three astronomical units away from a Z-space node in the galactic core, racing toward its normal-space boundary at a relative velocity of three kilometers per second. Calling upon the hexa-Morty bond and the random number generator in my head, I pre-targeted several thousand interior node points on an ergodic random walk, then redirected my cybernetic power reserves toward the portal gun's auto-weapon system. Going after individual Visser-Ricks would have taken too much time and could have triggered any number of traps. So I was just going to do a random brute-force sweep. Munchkin _that_ Visser-Me. 

Once the auto-weapon system sent me a full-power ack, I executed. First I pulled myself into a thousand-hertz spin about my head-to-foot axis, the outward centrifugal pressure in my tissues being counteracted by my body-forcefield and the nanotech in my cells. In rapid succession I fired portals through portals above my head. At three kilometers per second, I swept between each pair in a millisecond, bouncing between locations inside the Z-space node like a frenetic billiard ball, portal gun auto-neutralizing any Visser-Ricks in its sweeping kill-cone. 

Four seconds later, I had cleared the entire point cloud. One last portal brought me to the center of the Z-space node, at rest in its reference frame, surrounded by the charred chunks of Visser-Ricks. 

All-righty then. I reached out my mind to the machinery and re-established connection, bypassing and erasing the control hacks used by the Visser-Ricks, shutting down the cloning operation at the current location. Let's see... fifteen directly connected network nodes in the vicinity, more than two hundred within two steps, and several thousand within three. I sent out a propagating self-destruct order. Overriding permissions, with blocked network connections forcefully re-established. I jumped back to intergalactic space and watched the destruction spread through data streams gathered from micro-feeler-portals. Sixteen nodes down... then two hundred... eight hundred... 

The destruction stopped suddenly. _Damn it._ The Visser-Ricks found a counter. There were millions of nodes in the galaxy; even if these attacks kept working on a small scale, it wouldn't be fast enough. 

A sphere of green light burst into view around me. I targeted an alternate dimension, only to get a null ack. They were trying to block me in by saturating the portal density limit. Good luck with that, guys! I've got six Morties you motherfu- 

Two bond-tremors resonated through me in rapid succession, and it was everything I could do to stop it from flying apart entirely. Okay, _four Morties_. "Four more than you sons of bitches!" I shouted to the Ricks who were bearing down on me and firing the stun bolts rebounding off my force-field. I surged the Morty-bond and threw a moving portal above the sphere of Ricks. The portal grew in size and swept downward over everyone in the vicinity. 

"That right, motherfuckers!" I exclaimed, feeling the delicious tingle of intoxication, "Let's see how you _*buurrrrp*_ deal with the fucking Child Simulator Dimension!" And then the green threshold of the moving portal hit me. 

_AWWWW YEAHHH motherfuckers I'm TINY RICK. Fucking, fuckin' Tiny Rick, I'm yo best friend, dawg, yo, I'm the coolest motherfucker around, let's go do cocaine like the cool kids and drink juice out of our little sippy-cups and whatever else it is kids do these days because I'm fucking TIIIINY RIIIICK. Let's - oh hey guys, what are y'all doing'? (Everyone else was rolling on the ground clutching their heads screaming) oh right, y'all got a bunch of Tiny Esplins in your Tiny Rick brains, SUCKS TO SUCK. Have a lethal dose of cocaine you motherfuckers (I portaled the cocaine dimension and powdered cocaine started spilling out, burying them all alive) see ya later, alligators (I stepped through another portal and_

Whew, back in normal space, on a normal planet. Normal Rick. Okay. Fun as that was, this just wasn't working. _Sigh._ Time to swallow my pride. I targeted the Andalite homeworld. It was surrounded by a Z-space bubble preventing inward portals, but I surged the quad-Morty-bond again and pushed it through an opening created by the turbulence from the attacking Visser-Ricks, conjuring a portal directly to the surface of the planet. I stepped through. 

* * *

A twitching, zombified Andalite shambled towards me, the gaping mouth-wound in the lower-third of its head emanating rasping gasps. 

"Heeeeyy Unity," I said sheepishly. "Long time no see, eh?" 

The Andalite shambled to a stop and studied me. Then it slapped me across the face. "Fuck you Rick. You can't just strut up to me like that, not after how you ended things."

"I deserved that," I said. 

"Damn right. You don't want me? Fine. Then no special treatment for you. I am a proper Eldritch God, after all. If I can't have your love, then I will have bodies. Sacrifices. Kneel and offer thy gifts, puny human."

"Unity, baby, am I correct in understanding that you found me through Morty? In an isolated quarantine zone? Really. How _exactly_ did that come about? 

"I, uh, was just doing normal Eldritch God things when I sensed a disturbance in the Morty-force and came to investigate..."

"Bullshit. You were stalking me, weren't you? Inserted a little backdoor in the machine for yourself, amiright? No one could sense that disturbance without already being nearby. Morty's call was just an excuse to come talk to me. You certainly gave him quite a fright, though." 

"Look, I saw stuff going down and I thought you might be in trouble, all right?"

"Aha! So you're not over me." 

"Oh please, I'm totally over you. I just needed you alive because you owe me big time, you lying bastard."

"Unity, darling," I said in the sweetest voice I could manage. "I reeeally hate to spring this on you now, but I kiiind of need a small favor-" 

"Hahaha. Me? Give you a favor? You're the one who owes ME a favor. Besides, don't give me that crap about needing help with this. I saw you out there, doing just fine on your own."

"Actually, Visser Three is on the verge of escaping, and I promised Morty I would save this universe, and there's very little time left, so if you could just-" 

"Oh, so you'll do favors for Morty but not for me? Maybe I'll just let this place burn. Or burn it myself."

At that moment a portal opened next to me, out of which stepped one of the Animorph-Morties, who raised his weapon. 

"Stop!" I said. "It's me, Rick Prime!" I surged the Morty-bond as a verifier. This was Jake-Morty, I noted. Jake-Morty shifted his aim over to the Zombie Andalite representing Unity. "Whoa, lower your weapon," I said. "I know her." 

"She won't hurt us?" asked Jake-Morty. 

"I never said she won't hurt us, I just said that I know her." Unity glared at me with one eyestalk. 

‹Alright guys›, broadcast Jake-Morty, ‹The coast is... clear? I guess? Better restrain Ax though.› 

The other Animorph-Morties emerged. Then, strangely, the portal widened, growing well past the size of a building. 

"Rick!" exclaimed Marco-Morty. "We found the original series Ellimist! He's willing to help us defeat Visser Three-" 

_That's it! That's the answer!_ "Marco, that's perfect!" I exclaimed. "Bring him here!" Pulses of power reverberated through my dimensional senses as hidden subspace machinery squeezed through the enlarged portal. 

The Original Series Ellimist materialized next to me in his classic, wizened, pointy-eared form. 

Marco-Morty talked hurriedly and excitedly. "He can help reclaim the Z-space nodes on a massive scale and-" 

"No!" I said. "That's not what I had in mind when I sent you on this mission to retrieve him!" 

"You didn't send..." said Marco-Morty, trailing off when he noticed me frantically wiggling my eyebrows. 

I mouthed silent words to Marco-Morty and the Ellimist. _"Please just go with this."_

I turned back to Unity. "Unity, babe," I said in my best cheerful voice, "I didn't forget you at all! In fact, I've brought you a very special gift, which has just now arrived on my orders. You're better than me, babe, and you deserve better, which is why I've set you up on a date with The Ellimist!" I felt Marco-Morty spiritually facepalming behind me. "He's a mysterious cosmic being," I continued, "with a dark and harrowing past, and he's been lonely, oh so lonely, but when I told him about you he fell in love straight away and demanded to meet." 

I looked over at the Ellimist, who was grinning awkwardly while giving me some serious side-eye. "...Uhhh, yes, yes, absolutely, that is what happened," he said. "I just love the way you, uh, make everyone you meet a part of your life."

Unity looked the Ellimist up and down before turning back to me."This gift is acceptable," said Unity. "I was about to obliterate you for the sheer audacity, but you're just lucky that he's cute. Fine, I'll do your small favor. What is it you want, Rick?"

"Block the DDOS traffic for half a second and push Morty-Prime's signal through to the quarantine device." 

Slight pause... "Done. Morty should now be re-instantiated."

"Great! Now if you could just-" 

"Oh hell no, Rick. This doesn't settle things between us. You still owe me, and I will come back to collect. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a date to go on."

"Unity, wait!" But her Andalite puppets fell lifeless to the floor as she and the Ellimist disappeared. 

_Shit._ Portals appeared all around us as the attacking Visser-Ricks no longer faced Unity's barrier. With lightening reflexes I cast a moving portal over myself and the remaining Animorphs... 

An explosion propelled Jake-Morty and Tobias-Morty away from the portal. I reached out my hand, too late; the scenery around me phased into a new world like a windshield wiper across the sky. Two more bond-tremors resonated through me, and I fell to my knees trying to hold together what remained. I looked up at Ax-Morty and Marco-Morty and was surprised to see them _not_ breaking down in tears. Did Morty get tougher, or was that the influence of the Animorphs in his head? 

‹Why aren't they following us?› said Marco. 

"Because I'm maxing out the Morty bond to prevent them from tracing us, at least for a few more seconds," I said. "But they're winning." Down to two Morties, I couldn't hold off the shrinking half-space maneuver any longer. Even twenty minutes ago I was already beginning to feel the shift in the nearby deep field structure of the multiverse. "They're combining their Rick powers to block off entire dimensions. Every time I portal, they can re-adjust and halve our space of available targets, until the only place left to go is the stasis dimension. We just have to hope that Morty Prime gets through the checklist in time. Cthulhu help us." 

## Marco

We were losing, and living on a prayer. 

What would Visser Three do, were he in our situation? Rachel had described the workings of his mind the first time she was caught in the Leeran hypersight: relentlessly optimizing and obsessively thorough. Add to that Alloran's natural gift of multithreaded pattern-matching and his library of tactical knowledge, and he was nigh unstoppable. But not even the Visser could think his way out of a black hole, where every counterfactual line of causality led to the same inevitable future. 

Within seconds, the Visser-Ricks had broken through Rick's barrier and we were again on the run, through portal after portal. Morty was piloting our shared body, and distracting him would have been pointless. I couldn't add to this situation. So as we zigged and zagged through an evaporating pool of dimensions, I ignored the flurry of sensations from the morph and retreated into my mind to think. 

Multiverse portal tech was the most ridiculously broken game setting possible, I reflected. If you had a problem, all you had to do was just jump to a universe that contained the solution to your problem, and voilà. The only way to make things interesting was to impose arbitrary time-limits and restrictions, like Rick had done when he quarantined our universe. Would the alternative have been better or worse? Perhaps the Visser would have just left our universe alone and never looked back, had he full access to the possiblities. But, no. Someone like that can't rest until _everything_ is under his control, no matter the effort required. If only someone _sane_ could run reality, amiright? I knew the feeling. I was beginning to realize that it was probably this exact impulse which led to every horrible dictator in human history. 

There was a pause in the action, and I dared to direct my attention outwards. Rick, Ax-Morty, and I were on the ground panting, in an endless gray plain with tetrahedra and scattered internal organs. What the hell kind of a dimension was this? I accessed Morty's memories and saw the horror there. The Plane of Despair, it was sometimes called. Intelligent beings had a tendency to just materialize here without prior cause. Rick used them as target practice, citing the fact that rescuing everyone was too tedious. 

I was beginning to worry that _we_ had actually just materialized here, memories intact, when the Visser-Ricks caught up again and we portaled away. Phew. 

Jake was dead. Rachel was dead. Tobias was dead. Garrett was dead. 

And yet, they weren't. Morty seemed to think that we could easily bring them all back. And I was sure we could. In all likelihood, from _their_ perspective they never died at all; with the multiverse containing infinite copies of everyone in every scenario, surely they just continued living somewhere else without realizing they had jumped universes? 

What was the point of anything in this scenario? What was the point of _trying?_ Too much light was just as blinding as none at all; no _differences_ could be distinguished by sight. Too many actualities were just as bad as nothing having ever existed; no _differences_ could be made by action. 

Or... could they? Was there a fallacy I had missed? Hope still tickled my intuition. 

At last, we were cornered. 

On a barren planet in a galaxy far, far away, we crouched under the dome of Rick's maxed-out force-field, surrounded by green lights and Visser-Ricks. 

‹It's over, Rick›, sounded the Visser in our heads. ‹All portals lead to the stasis dimension. The sooner you surrender, the gentler we will be. All we want is an exit.› Weirdly, many of the Visser-Ricks were twitching and cackling uncontrollably. 

‹Marco,› sounded another Visser-Rick in my head. ‹We could use a Morty on our side. Betray Rick! Join me, and together we will rule the multiverse!› 

‹Did you...›, I replied, ‹did you... just quote _Star Wars_??› 

Visser-Rick's reply was a confusing cacophany of voices. ‹Hahahahaha...damn it Rick, you said that would persuade him...hahahahaha› 

Huh. 

Suddenly, the Visser-Ricks disintegrated into a scarlet mist of blood, and the green portal light faded into the sparkling brilliance of the sky beyond. Morty Prime stood in front of us, wearing a strange high-tech spacesuit. 

_"Hey guys! Everything's going to be o-"_


	3. Chapter 3

**Morty:** -kay.   
**Rick:** Took you long enough. Did you bring everything on the checklist?   
**Morty:** Yup. [Tosses Rick the utility pack.]   


Rick takes out a glove and puts it on his hand. The glove grows around him into the same high-tech suit worn by Morty. He tosses gloves to Marco-Morty and Ax-Morty.

**Rick:** Put these on. They tap directly into the quarantine machine. Make you invulnerable. 

Marco-Morty and Ax-Morty comply. More Visser-Ricks portal into the vicinity, but Rick snaps his fingers and annihilates them. He takes out another device. 

**Marco-Morty:** What what... what is _that_?   
**Rick:** It's a Rick-wave-generator. Dumps energy into the quantum Rick-field and powers up every Rick nearby, making them even more extreme. Normally it would be a terrible idea to power up Rick adversaries, but in this case...   


Rick dials up the generator. Around the galaxy, Visser-Ricks begin maniacally laugh-screaming and clutching their heads. One-by-one, they kill themselves. Rick monitors the cleansing process on his wrist-hologram, shielded from the effects by his suit. 

**Rick:** Huh. [Turns off the machine] Looks like we got just one tough Esplin hold-out left. [Points to the single remaining blip in the hologram.] Let's go. 

Rick, Ax-Morty, Marco-Morty, and Regular-Morty portal over to the blip, which turns out to be on the Blade ship. A lone Visser-Rick remains, rolling on the floor, cackling to himself.

**Visser-Rick:** Hahahaha, aaaahahahahaha... please help me... hahahaha ... I was supposed to live forever! I was so close! Ahhhh get get get schwifty you little mllllrrrrrrimmmsers, _I was supposed to be a God, damn it_ .... ahahahahaha oh god why is reality like this   
**Morty:** Awww. Looks like the poor guy's gone insane.   
**Rick:** Come on buddy, up you go. [Lifts Visser-Rick to his feet]   
**Morty:** Now what?   
**Rick:** Now we kill two birds with one stone. [Checks his watch] Right about... now. 

Unity materializes on the ship as one of her Zombie-Andalite puppets. 

**Unity:** The date was a sham, you lying son of a bitch. I'm gonna destroy this universe. I'm gonna enslave everyone and tear it apart at its seams...   
**Rick:** Not if offered a powerful enough sacrifice for your mercy, as you are bound to accept by Eldritch law. And I've got _just the thing_!   
**Unity:** How dare you invoke Eldritch law with me, after our history together   
**Rick:** You're the one who said you're over me, babe. That you would treat me like anyone else.   
**Unity:** [Sighs]   
**Rick:** O great Old One, according to the Laws of the Ancient Gods, and in exchange for the safety and protection of this Animorphs sub-multiverse, I present to you this rarest of sacrifices! A Visser-Rick-C-137, tenderized by battle, salted by defeat, stewed in insanity!   
**Unity:** [Grudgingly] O ... noble ... Rick, fundament of the multiverse, steward of reality, this gift is most... pleasing... to me. In accordance with the Laws of the Ancient Gods, I ... accept the terms.   
**Rick:** Then it is done.   
**Unity:** So it shall be.

Everyone stares at Rick and Unity. Visser-Rick continues babbling.

**Rick:** So, uh, I forget what comes next... do I, do I kill him or...   
**Unity:** No, don't bother, just... [sigh] ... just portal him over to the Andalite homeworld and I'll incorporate him into my being or something.   
**Rick:** Got it. [Creates a portal and pushes Visser-Rick toward it.] In you go, buddy.   
**Visser-Rick:** Ahahahaha, ahahahaha, nooooooo please! ahahahaha yesss do it bro-ski, hahaha existence is suffering but nothing is real, hahahaha [disappears through the portal]   
**Unity:** Goodbye, Rick. [Disappears]

Everyone continues staring at Rick. 

**Marco-Morty:** So. Um.   
**Rick:** Alrighty, let's just get some plot threads tied up real quick. Don't demorph.   


Rick probes the remaining compactified morphing tech in Marco's Z-space extension and extracts the data on all the Animorphs who have died. With a snap of his fingers, they are resurrected. Rick then deletes all Rick and Morty data to prevent further cloning and severs the connection between the two Morty-morphs and the tech that created them, rendering them full independent beings. Another wave of his hand brings Marco and Ax out of morph instantly and materializes them next to the resurrected Animorphs, who are temporarily being held unconscious. The two new Morties are placed in stasis in Rick's personal pocket dimension for later release into the wild. (As every Rick knows, Morty conservation is an important and necessary practice.) 

**Rick:** Okay, so, part of the terms of the sacrifice just now were that Unity maintains a small presence to oversee the universe in question. So a word of advice, the Andalite homeworld is Cronenberg palace now, just... just avoid that place at all costs. Don't go within a hundred light years of there. Oh, and also, you're going to have to keep making sacrifices every year to renew the pact.   
**Marco:** ...okay...   
**Rick:** And you can keep these suits. There's enough for all the Animorphs. It's the least I can do. They basically give you god-level control over your entire sub-multiverse. The Animorphs are now the Guardians of the Frickin' Galaxy. Use your power wisely.   
**Marco:** [Shocked] I... thank you. We will.   
**Rick:** Nah, I'm just kidding. Existence is meaningless, do whatever the fuck you want with your power. But I'm not letting you out of your sub-multiverse.   
**Ax:** ‹I will never forgive you for what you have done to my people-›   
**Rick:** Oh! I almost forgot! I've been working on new planet-sized portal tech... I think I can bring you a new homeworld from one of the alternate dimensions, let's see... [snaps fingers and a planet appears in front of them] This is a copy of your homeworld from right before all this stuff happened! All your friends are right there, waiting for - oh. Oh crap. I forgot to portal the atmosphere... they're uh, they're all dead. Wait, let me try again...   
**Ax:** ‹Get out. GET OUT.›   
**Rick:** Time to go, Morty!   
**Ax:** ‹I will escape this universe and find you. I will avenge my species a million times over. I will kill every last Rick and Morty in existence...›   
**Rick:** Better beings have tried! Bye! [Rick and Morty press buttons on their suits and disappear.] 

* * *

Rick and Morty materialize back in the lab. They look at each other for several seconds. And then they both collapse on the ground. 

**Morty:** AaaaaAAAAAahhhhhhhHHaaahaa [moaning and crying]   
**Rick:** Holy shit, holy shit, that was... I was _not_ in control of that situation at all-   
**Morty:** WE GENOCIDED THE FUCKING ANDALITE SPECIES, _TWICE_ , WHAT THE FUCK   
**Rick:** ...I mean, I was just making everything up as I went along, how _the fuck_ did we even make it   
**Morty:** No more adventures! NO MORE ADVENTURES   
**Rick:** Oh my god, oh my god, we need a break. I'm all for committing to the narrative, but that was just too much. Let's just lay off the adventures for a while.   
**Morty:** Agreeeeeeed. Ahhhhhhh [continues crying] 

Roll credits. 

* * *

**"You and Me, Visser Three"**   
Performed lovingly by Justin Roiland 

Baby, can't get you out of my head   
Reignin' down from above   
I'm walkin' in your stead   
Slavin' to your love   
  
You and me   
Visser Three   
Ever at the top of my mind   
Quite literally   
  
Babe, you're so considerate and wise   
Always seein' things through others' eyes   
The way you wholly touch my thoughts   
It moves me.   
  
You and me   
Visser Three   
Couldn't leave you if I tried   
What a pair we'll be   
  
Babe, you've got ambition   
You're holding all the cards   
Fragmenting like fission   
Controlling all the shards   
  
You and me   
Mister V   
Can't hide my feelings for you   
I love, acerbically   
  
Darlin', squeeze my hand   
And never let me go   
Without you, I can't stand   
The mortal puppet-show   
  
You and me   
Visser Three   
You're always in my head   
Strengthening our love 

* * *

**End-credits scene.**

Jake stared back at the foul thing on the screen. I saw what he saw, and I felt as if my brain was shutting down. In that shifting alien face was every corruption, every evil, and such power that it seemed impossible it could be present in just the narrow confines of the onrushing Blade ship. 

"Can we shoot?" Jake asked Menderash, making no attempt to conceal his words from the alien. 

"His Dracon cannons have longer range and greater power," Menderash reported grimly. "And his defensive fields have been enhanced. I doubt our cannons can penetrate them." 

"Thought so," Jake said, still weirdly calm. "But we're faster." 

"Yes." 

"Okay." Jake took a deep breath. He looked around the bridge at each of us. At Tobias. At me. "What was it, Marco? 'Crazy, reckless, ruthless decisions'?" 

I nodded, wishing I had kept my mouth shut. There was a dangerous smile on Jake's face. Rachel's smile. 

"Full emergency power to the engines," Jake said. "Ram the Blade ship." 

"Wait!" A figure had materialized on the bridge, wearing a strange suit. Was that... was that _me_? Another Marco? 

The new figure turned to the screen. "Unity," he said, "what do you think you're doing? We had an agreement." 

"You are late on your yearly sacrifice," said The One, who apparently also went by the name Unity. "As a proper Eldritch God, I cannot encourage this sort of behavior." 

"We're sorry! This is all new to us, okay! Please, please just give us a couple more days. Pleeeaaase." 

What the _hell?_

"Fine," said Unity. "You have one day. ONE. Got it?"

"Thank you!" said the alternate me. "Now please give Ax back to them. They don't deserve this." 

The Blade ship suddenly disappeared. Ax materialized on the bridge, fully healed, his unnatural mouth gone. 

Jake looked back and forth from me to the Marco in the weird space-suit. "Um," said Jake. 

"I'm really sorry about this, guys," said Alter-Marco. "I'll come back later and explain, but I've gotta take care of some stuff right now." 

"...okay?" replied Jake. 

Alter-Marco vanished. 

"Well," I said, grinning like a fool at the sudden release of the tension from just minutes prior. "Weirder things have happened to us, frankly. As far as endings go, I'll take it." 


	4. Extras

**DNR:** Hello and welcome to the Dimension of Natural Resources, how may I help you?   
**Customer:** Wait, who is talking?   
**DNR:** I don't understand the question? I am the Dimension of Natural Resources.   
**Customer:** You're... you're a sentient dimension?   
**DNR:** Precisely! In the multiverse's canonical ordinal embedding, my dimension number corresponds to an integer in the Sentient Set; that is, the set of integers whose prime factorizations encode sentient beings.   
**Customer:** That's not how numbers work.   
**DNR:** That's not how your _concept_ of numbers works, true, but once you understand Number in the fullest sense, it couldn't be any other way... 

* * *

**DNR:** Hello and welcome to the Dimension of Natural Resources, how may I help you?   
**Customer:** Yes, hello, I'd like six wheat, twelve wood, five brick...   
**DNR:** I will _not_ help you cheat at Settlers of Catan. Good day, sir. 

* * *

**DNR:** Hello and welcome to the Dimension of Natural Resources, how may I help you?   
**Customer:** I need large quantities of biological elements for mass-scale clone synthesis.   
**DNR:** Can do, sir! Now, will you be paying with universe beads, or...   
**Customer:** Wait, you have to _pay_?   
**DNR:** Yes sir! Nothing in life is free. I have little sentient subgroups to feed.   
**Customer:** Uh, well in that case... _This is a robbery! Don't move_   
**DNR:** Oh my god, oh my god   
**Customer:** Give me what I want or I'll add 1 to you and wreck your whole factorization!   
**DNR:** Take them! Take the materials! Ahhhhhh 

* * *

**And now, excerpts from the trashy Jake/Marco slash fics you could have been reading instead...**

**Rick:** This is your adventure, Morty. How do you want to proceed?   
**Morty:** Well, I did always ship Jake and Marco...   
**Rick:** Done. Jake is now gay. 

Meanwhile... 

**Jake:** Hey Marco?   
**Marco:** Yeah?   
**Jake:** Did you do something to your hair? Because you are looking _extra sexy_ today 

\---

**Marco:** hey Jake wanna smash   
**Jake:** bro im not gay tho   
**Marco:** [morphs into hot girl] how bout now [jiggles boobs sexily]   
**Jake:** okay i can work with this 

\---

**Marco:** hey Jake wanna smash   
**Jake:** no Marco, we've been over this   
**Marco:** sure, you won't have sex with other men, but would you have sex with... _yourself?_ [morphs into Jake]   
**Jake:** holy shit 

\---

**Marco:** okay Jake, now you morph into me   
**Jake:** [morphs into Marco]   
**Marco:** okay, now i'll morph into you... [morphs into Jake]   
**Jake:** what is this for Marco   
**Marco:** now, activate my consciousness... just trust me... 

* * *

From the dim, rain-slicked street below, the silhouette of a figure could be seen in the window of the ancient house. 

Sam Winchester paced back and forth in his second-floor bedroom, staring out at the streetlamps below with a troubled frown on his face. There was something off about tonight. He could feel it in his weathered bones. 

Then he noticed something. At his neighbor's house across the street, there was only one car in the driveway. How odd. Sam drew closer to the window, breath glazing the glass with white mist, and shifted his gaze down the street. A single streetlamp had gone out. Hair stood up on the back of his neck. He looked down at his watch. 1:12 am, it read. _Oh no._

Sam took out his phone and, with trembling hand, dialed his brother Dean. 

"What's up, Sam?" croaked Dean, groggily. 

"Dean, listen to me! The number one, it's everywhere! The dreaded symbol of Unity! She is returning!" 

"No she's not," said Dean, voice suddenly imbued with an eerie overtone. "She's already here, my darling." 

No! Sam threw down the phone and backed away. He looked at his hands... five fingers. No, wait, not five... _one_ finger, and next to it another _one_ , and another... 

"Don't fight it, dear," said the voice on the phone. "The assimilation will be over very soon."

Sam collapsed to floor and crawled, weakly, towards his utility cabinet. If he could only contact Null... 

* * *

**Interdimensional cable presents: The Adventures of Mr. Poopybutthole**

Mr. Poopybutthole is walkin' down the street on this here fine mornin', all hummin' to himself, yes-sir-ee, when he sees a commotion in his neighbor's yard. He struts over to investigate. 

"Mornin' Mrs. Vaginabreasthole, what seems to be the trouble?" 

"Oh dear me, dear me," says Mrs. Vaginabreasthole, "someone's done gone and got up in my cabbage patch again, oh poor little me, poor little me." 

"Dag nabbit," says Mr. Poopybutthole, angrily, "I bet it's that good-for-nuttin' rascal Jesus McTits again, always gettin' up in people's cabbages..." 

* * *

Somewhere in the multiverse, a historic gathering is taking place...  
**Alien 1:** ...and in conclusion, we believe in free trade, peace, prosperity, and justice for all! Thank you! [Clapping]   
**Alien 2:** Literally every word you just said was a racial slur in my language. I am now bound by honor to kill you. [Takes out gun and gets tackled by security]   
**Alien 1:** Oh, I'm so sorry, I guess I'll just stay silent-   
**Alien 3:** NO! For then you would be guilty of cultural appropriation from _us_ , the Silent Ones - _oh God, I've broken the sacred silence_ [kills self]   
**Alien 4:** Your _face_ is a racial slur in my language [tackles alien 1]   
**Alien 5:** Peace... what a strange thing to maximize. Now, the color blue, _that's_ something-   
**Alien 6:** I am deeply offended by your failure to acknowledge all 438 genders in your speech.   
**Alien 7:** Excuuuse me, but there are 561 genders, you backwards imbecile [punches alien 6]   
**Alien 8:** [Holding up a protest sign] EAT YOUR CHILDREN. IT'S THE RIGHT THING TO DO.   
**Alien 9:** As a paperclip maximizer, the lack of paperclips here makes me feel personally attacked.   
**Alien 10:** YOU WILL ALL BE MODIFIED TO ENABLE SEX WITH US. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE.   
**Rick H-417:** [Running from the carnage] You know, in retrospect the Million Worlds Social Justice Conference may have been ill-conceived... 

* * *

Duncan Sabien sits in his home, sipping coffee, typing away at his latest project for the Center For Applied Rationality. Suddenly, a green portal starts expanding in his living-room. 

Even at the earliest flickers of green light off his monitor, Duncan is in motion, reaching for his personal CFAR-issued handgun, launching out of his chair and crouching in Optimal Stance, the most Rational possible martial-arts stance, as every CFAR-employee is trained to do. 

The portal finishes opening, and Rick Sanchez steps through, portal gun at the ready in weapon-mode, leveled at Duncan. 

"Duncan Sabien," says Rick. "You are a slow writer. We demand more r!Animorphs chapters, fast!" 

"I'm busy!" exclaims Duncan, with pitch-perfect innocence. "I've got important stuff to do at my job!" 

"Now, we both know that's a lie," says Rick. "I know what CFAR is _really_ up to. I know about the Secret Meetings. There's no such thing as rationality, is there? By calling things names like 'Optimal' and 'Rational', all with Nice Capital Letters, you obscure the deeper truth, which is that after a certain point, Bayes' theorem just stops working, and everything just becomes magic and faith. That's the secret your organization has kept for centuries, under its many names. Write more r!Animorphs chapters, or I will expose this precious information to the public." 

The innocence melts off Duncan's face, uncovering a sneer of hate. "Ah yes, Rick, you've discovered our little secret, but you've underestimated our abilities... I'm more powerful than you can possibly imagine." 

Duncan fires his gun. The instant he pulls the trigger, Rick raises a shield to deflect - but the bullet _curves,_ arcing around the room and into Rick's shoulder from behind. Rick gasps and drops to one knee, dissipating his shield and firing his energy weapon. The blast is deflected off the magic shield that Duncan has conjured, devastating the nearby kitchen. 

"Let this be a warning, Rick," says Duncan, menacingly. "Today I will let you live. But, should you pursue this matter, tomorrow you will not be so lucky." 

Duncan disappears in a cloud of smoke, leaving Rick bleeding in the living room. "This isn't over," whispers Rick, gritting his teeth and firing a portal back to his sanctuary. "I will get those Reckoning chapters. _One way or another._ " 


End file.
